''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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Armande that has brought him back:
Practically all the dreams in which she
had appeared to him after her death had
been staged not in the settings of an
American winter but in those of Swiss
mountains and Italian lakes...
The desideratum was a moment of contact
with her essential image in exactly remembered
surroundings (94-95).
To fulfill this desideratum proves to be a vain at-
tempt, partly because the surroundings have changed
and partly because Hugh's memories are inexact. He
finds his expectations and his memories disappointed
and contradicted wherever he goes. The shutters of
the hotel, which he remembers as green, are red, and
the hall (although the author says that it "was no
doubt as squalid as it had always been" [3]) seems
to him unfamiliar. For a long time he cannot remember
which room on the third floor he occupied on his
former visit. Witt has changed. There are new roads
and new houses, "crowding out the meager landmarks
he remembered or thought he remembered" (87). He-
finds the surroundings of Villa Nastia unrecognizable.
He makes a painful and exhausting effort to repeat
one of the hikes on which he accompanied Armande in
the past. He hopes that this will evoke her image
with sufficient clarity and grant him what he is
longing for. "Had she passed here, had her soles once
imprinted their elaborate pattern in that clay? " (90)
But there is a new road, there are a number of new
climbs and cableways, and also, his memory lets him
down again. Places and paths that he thought he remembered
look unfamiliar. A stream and a broken bridge