On p.144 (F.Bowers - Harvest Book), almost at the beginning of his lecture on Tolstoy's Anna Karenin,  Nabokov explains that it "is not my custom to speak of plots but in the case of Anna Karenin I shall make an exception since the plot of it is essentially a moral plot, a tangle of ethical tentacles, and this we must explore before enjoying the novel on a higher level than plot."

In other texts he is very explicit about some of the elements that fascinate him in Art on a higher level." It is the enchanter, “more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher" who interests him, or “the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures” (NG:78) in Gogol, or Shakespeare’s “verbal poetical texture…as immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays.” 

Nabokov starts his novels on index cards, because their arrangement serves to fill in "the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind." (SOp. 16) at the stage when (like a nest-building bird) he feels "this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles [ ] "having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure" until there "comes a moment where I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished." SO 31/2)  He adds:that "this entire structure...can be compared to a painting and you don't have to work gradually from left to right..." (SO 32): He is not consciously a yarn-spinner because he seems to isolate a cerebral plot from the emerging visual structure of the novel, but this aspect is not very clear to me. What about his "combinational talents" to compose "riddles with elegant solutions" ? (p.16) Or "the instant vision turning into rapid speech"? (SO 109) -  Where do these fit in when we keep in mind his ambition towards "a higher level than plot"?  (actually, what does this really mean?)

For Brian Boyd, "Nabokov has a reputation for being a great prose stylist, perhaps even the greatest. The Original of Laura makes me want to rethink what constitutes the distinctively Nabokovian: not just elevated prose, a recondite lexicon, elegant quicksilver sentences, minute precision of visual detail, pointed allusion, foregrounded verbal combinatory play, lucid elusiveness. His style may be most extraordinary not so much as prose but as story."  http://theamericanscholar.org/nabokov-lives-on/#.UjKFFNKsiSo

Thoughts, anyone?