"King,Queen, Knave" was written by VN in 1927/28, and translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov, probably in 1968.  I found a reference in it to a word that will be used again in Pale Fire ( in KQK it is "plexibility", applied to an inventor's project; in Pale Fire it appears as "plexed artistry".)
I was curious about the date in which this word became of common usage, such as in "'Plexiglass", and how was it originally rendered in Nabokov's Russian original.
Could anyone familiar with Korol', Dama, Valet help with the term ( plexibility) in Russian?

Again I came to a closed door while googling, so I couldn't check the context of David Rampton's reference to Shade's words:
Rampton, David 1950- "Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer's Harlot's Ghost"
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 30, Number 1, Fall 2006, pp. 47-63
Indiana University Press

I found out there was a movie, directed by Jerzy Skolimosky in 1972, with David Niven and Gina Lollobrigida, inspired in this novel. Most commentaries emphasized its "comicity".I read the novel in English a long time ago ( it is not one of my favourites) but now I'm getting it through an old translation into Portuguese -  a very poor translation by the way.
Certain adjectives ( hyperboles, most of the time) sound strange in Portuguese and are very repetitive ( "softness", "golden", "nacreous", plus some synaesthetic uses, as in could be "resounding green grapes"). These adjectives are out-moded, even in the twenties. They are heavy and awkward in the translation  I found. 
I'm anxious to check them against the English since, for me, this kind of extemporaneous absurdity is totally absent from VN's work, when I read him in English - but then English is not my native language and I wonder if there are studies about VN's particular use of /'adjectives/', or their outcome in another language.

The listing of films also showed the names of other Nabokovian movies and I saw that "Bend Sinister", in German, became Das Bastardzeichen ( it got its translation from heraldry but I remember VN denied he had chosen it with that meaning ..).  In English a "knave" is not merely a "valet" in the genealogy offered in the pack of cards: is it also intended as a part of its associative nimbus?