In his American novels, Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov demonstrates his perfect mastery of the English language but he also exhibits his personal multilingualism. This can lead to the impression that his oeuvre was meant for an elite sharing the same idiolect as him. However, we intend to show that the inscription of foreign words (or xenisms) in the midst of English words is actually a means of preparing the monolingual English-speaking reader to Nabokov’s heteroglossia: indeed, the typography and many metalinguistic comments surround the foreign word with a cushion of precaution, so that the reader grows accustomed to this recurring transplant into her mother tongue. Moreover, the reader is granted intellectual access to xenisms thanks to different types of explanation and translation; but she’s also given a sensory and sensual perception of foreign languages, which become connoted with pleasure and even eroticism. The heteroglossic text turns out to be a palimpsest where the different layers of languages will be perceived according to the reader’s linguistic knowledge and acumen. This puts to the fore what the Nabokovian reader was supposed to be for the demanding writer: “a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled.” (Nabokov 1990, 183)