One of the Nabokovian visions invited him to follow the destiny of a lorgnon, seen along various Russian stories until, at last, it was dropped into the sea. Nabokov inserted an unpaired glove intratextually in Bend Sinister, but it often travels in his other novels ( to be "happy" in Zemblan, thereby joining another Zemblan proverb later on)
I had set myself the aerial task (whenever I travel I carry Nabokov in my purse, like a bible) to locate the transformation of a skye-terrier into a weeping-willow. As it was posted before:
1. RLSK, concerning Clare's vivid imagination and " that real sense of beauty ...to discern ... the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier."
2. PF: Aunt Maud's Skye-terrier and Kinbote's addendum that these dogs belong to "the breed called in our country 'weeping-willow dog'. "
I haven't yet found the spot I need, but came across an associative element, mentioning willows and gloves, present in its links: (Speak Memory, ch.4, p.87)
"There was lovely, black-haired, aquamarine-eyed Miss Norcott, who lost a white kid glove at Nice or Beaulieu, where I vainly looked for it on the shingly beach among the colored pebbles and the glaucous lumps of sea-changed bottle glass. Lovely Miss Norcott was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia. She embraced me in the morning twilight of the nursery, pale-mackintoshed and weeping like a Babylonian willow, and that day I remained inconsolable..."
In this paragraph we find the pregnant images that later formed proverbs, gloves, dogs, willows, and aqua-marines. The distant "babylonian" rumble of corruption is here added to a shakespearing "sea-change" that engenders harlequin pebbles and (blue) bottles
(these, were later metamorphosed into VN's father's favorite flower or disagreable kinbotean flies).
VN apparently contradicts what he once said in SO about the indestructibility of loved memories ( translated in SM in chapter 5 on "Mademoiselle" ...NB: it was originally written in the lovely French VN had been familiar with through his beloved bumbling Swiss governess) "after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasure item of my past, it would pine away..." to conclude: "the man in me revolts against the fictionist" and save a clumsy condemned swan from destruction and setting down one of his most memorable chapters.
Temptation forces me to add still another tid-bit. A marvellous example of VN's inspired personifications. I feel the sullen day's wetness and a child's frustration...Here it comes:
ch 6, 119:On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle."