The Russian language, which otherwise is comparatively poor in abstract terms, supplies definitions for two types or stages of inspiration, vostorg and vdokhnovania, which can be paraphrased as “rapture” and “recapture.” The difference between them is mainly of a climatic kind, the first being hot and brief, and the second cool and sustained. The kind alluded to up to now is the pure flame of vostorg, initial rapture, which has no conscious purpose in view but which is all-important in linking the breaking up of the old work with the building up of the new one. When the time is ripe and the writer settles down to the actual composing of his book, he will rely on the second, serene and steady kind of inspiration, vdokhnovsnia, the trusted mate who helps to recapture and reconstruct the world.
Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak, from the essay “The Creative Writer”