Absolutely, and I can fully understand not liking PninI did not like it myself after a first read, and only began to appreciate it (though it's still far from my favorite) upon returning to it after reading most of his other works.
To people new to Nabokov I generally recommend Laughter in the Dark first, as it's one of his easiest books in terms of vocabulary and there's something about it that makes it a really smooth read, and The Defense second.
Unless your English is really poor I'd take the English translations over the German ones. Not because the latter are necessarily bad (I have no clue), but because Nabokov was personally involved with the English translations of all his Russian works: he made copious corrections to and rewrites of early drafts so that every word appearing in print bears his stamp of approval.
My personal favorite of his works is Laughter in the Dark.
It's so strong emotionally and so dark and full of misanthropy you just want to lay down and die after reading it.
I've got to check that out later. I just happened to read Lolita last week and it while I did enjoy it a lot, it was quite challenging on many levels I had trouble understanding the language, then I had trouble getting the references (and probably missed most of them too), and then I had trouble dealing with the emotional impact. Definitely want to read more of Nabokov's books, but not right now.
If you ever feel like rereading Lolita, I can recommend "The Annotated Lolita" by Alfred Appel, it's just the book with a whole bunch of notes at the end explaining various references, and the Foreword is nice too.
I'm particularly interested in reading Bely, Gogol and Pushkin in their native tongue. Are you familiar with their work?
Gogol is one of my favorite writers indeed!
And yes, it's really hard to image his books in some other language than Russian (some of them are with a lot of Ukrainian words in 'em actually).
I think he must be one of the most difficult Russian writers to translate to some other language (not talking about poets here).
Yeah, I have Bely's "Gogol's Artistry" in English translation and it really stresses how much I'm missing. It's a study of Gogol's style and most of what he discusses pertains to particular patterns in Gogol's use of the Russian language, a significant part of which loses its meaning in translation. I still love it, but expect to love it a whole lot more when I finally learn Russian.
Nabokov has written a little book on Gogol too, and that's in fact how I first heard about him. I especially love his discussion of the short story The Overcoat.