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

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in its capability of photographic retention ("I have
always possessed a memory of the camera type" [71])
and in an obsession with mirrorings, simple repetitions
and doublings. A pine forest, pictures, people, statues,
whole scenes strike him as familiar; a couple of "in-
separable birches" (43) keep reappearing; some little
girls playing marbles, a pince-nez'd waiter. Wandering
about in Tarnitz, he feels that the town is "con-
structed of certain refuse particles of my past":
...
I discovered in it things most remarkably
and most uncannily familiar to me:
a low pale-blue house, the
exact counterpart
of which I had seen in a St. Petersburg
suburb; an old-clothes shop, where
suits'hung that had belonged to dead
acquaintances of mine; a, street lamp bearing
the same number... as one that had
stood in front of the Moscow house where
I lodged; and nearby the same bare birch
tree with the same forked trunk in an
iron corset... (80).
Hermann seems to offer these as fascinating clues to
some hidden meaning, but, as Suagee puts it, "we can
never penetrate their tangled surface simply because
Hermann does not tell us enough. "18 One might add, be-
cause Hermann does not combine them into a recognizable
pattern. Composing his narration, he interrupts him-
self at various points, conscious of "the muddle and
mottle of my tale" (62), which he excuses by stating
that "the real author is not I, but my impatient mem-
ory" (47), "which has its own whims and rules" (62).
This amounts to a confession that both his memory and
his mind lack the artistic gift of selecting, ordering
and combining. Therefore the pictures he conjures up
from his past can appear as no more than somewhat
intriguing but basically meaningless repetitions and