I've noticed a fair amount of similarities between Jonathan Swift and Vladimir Nabokov

They both: •were fond of transgressive, acerbic satire •had a very limited set of principal interests(in Swift's case, reading/writing and British politics/society/culture, in Nabokov's reading/writing and butterflies) •could be very grouchy(Swift in particular strikes me as a very miserable person) •had virtually no interest in or appreciation of music

I'd like to back up(in a non-academically rigorous fashion) two of the claims I made here, Nabokov's limited set of interests and Swift being a miserable person.

Edit:I am not sure if the following story about Nabokov is true, so take it with a grain of salt.In terms of Nabokov, I read a story somewhere that he was in the middle of writing something while a battle of the Russian Revolution was going on nearby, and his reaction to the battle was essentially just to complain about the racket preventing him from being able to focus on his writing. In my opinion, this story demonstrates his lack of interest in anything else relative to writing. I mean, what kind of person would respond to a major ongoing political conflict in such a curmudgeonly, self-centered way?

Regarding Swift, I have more to say. His entire satirical persona can be summed up as:world-weary misanthropic puritanical cynic poses as idealistic everyman in order to deliver harsh truths to readers(I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a very nice or happy person to me). In addition to Gulliver's Travels, which is basically about an initially cheerful man gradually discovering how awful the world is and humans are, Swift wrote a poem about a man who is initially attracted to a woman but is then disillusioned when he discovers that women have basic bodily functions just as men do(I believe "Celia shits" is an actual quotation from that poem).