A 1996  Nab L-posting mentions W.G.Sebald's "The Emigrants", with its four distinct narratives united by recurring images, among which we find four Nabokov ghostly apparitions. It's my impression that,at the time Sebald wrote this novel, he hadn't yet mastered the intriguing associative flow of memories and inventions that we'll meet later, in "The Rings of Saturn" and in "Austerlitz." In the midst of greyness, desolate landscapes and ruined buildings, an almost clownish Nabokov emerges, like an oasis of hope and light.  

 

The reproduction of a Nabokov photograph, in Gstaad (inserted in the first narrative, about "Dr. Henry Selwyn"), was posted recently. His second "cameo appearance" comes in "Paul Bereyter," through "Speak,Memory" (which a lady, mme. Landau, is reading in the Promenade des Corderliers on the day she  meets Bereyter). The third one, for "Ambros Adelwarth," happens in the fields of a mental institution, in Ithaca. Nabokov's name isn't mentioned but he is presented as a middle-aged man with a white butterfly net lepping about: "It's the butterfly man, you know. He comes round here quite often," says Ambros Adelwarth, with a slight hint of humour. On the eve of his death the same Adelwarth informs his doctor that he forgot his appointment for "It must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man." (the year must have been 1952 or 1953).

The fourth vision is found in "Max Ferber," a lonely artist who thrives on dust and decay, after he leaves his studio in Manchester to visit Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. During his trip he spends some time in Montreux and, while climbing the Grammont for the second time, he comes across a sixtyish Nabokov with his net, "like someone who's popped out of the bloody ground" and impedes Ferber's plunge into the void. 

Sebald's gloomy memoirs invoke, in vain, memorialist Nabokov's light touch for his retrospective peregrinations.