Nabokov's Aesthetic of Literature

Nabokov's aesthetic of the novel is shown in his words on Gogol:

His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not of ideas.

A very brief summary of the butterfly killer Nabokov's feeling for literature and aversion to the dark matter of ideas entering this domain which, it is claimed, is purely a phenomenon of language. Dostoevsky, for instance, especially met Nabokov's disdain. Well, it is self-evident that literature is a phenomenon of language, but rather than simply stop there, the issue then becomes what is language. Language is something which intrinsically involves the creation of meaningful structures, such as sentences, and which sentences may transmit the substances called ideas. Nabokov's notion that language is something distinct from what language creates and embodies is nonsensical.
Here someone will say, perhaps, that Nabokov is talking of the aesthetic grace of language, and the point of the superiority of good over bad writing obviously needs no debating.
Another point, however, is that if one pulls back one's view far enough, Nabokov's "non-utilitarian delight" in pure aesthetic form is itself an example of the novel of ideas he disdains. This aesthetic self-containment being an idea of a novel, of which persumably his own work is an imagined example. It's the application of an intellectual concept, though this overarching idea involves a schizophrenic and castrated understanding of what language is.

The earlier mention of Nabokov's pathological addiction to the killing of butterflies and preserving their now dead forms was not meant to suggest that his sense of literature could in any way be equated with this preference for beautiful dead simulations over messy truth- elegant sterile abstractions pinned harmlessly on a page.