A more extensive examination is to be found in Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism, by John Burt Foster,1993(87-90):
"Especially striking, given the contrast between Nabokov's
disdain for social messages and Benjamin's reputation as an innovative
sociologist of literature, both writers take Proust seriously as a prophetic
social analyst....Thus when Benjamin stresses Proust's "merciless depiction" of
Parisian high society, then he suggests that his full social significance will
become apparent only "in the final struggle," his Marxist terminology conveys
the same general insight as Kamera
Obskura.[...] Alongside their convergences, however, Nabokov and
Benjamin differ sharply...when Kamera
Obskura downplays Rimbaud in favor of Proust, Nabokov implicitly
rejects any such effor to assimilate the modernist masters to the avant-garde
[ ]Nabokov is also much less receptive to German and Austro-German
thought than Benjamin; indeed, as his cultural identity develops from the
mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Bergson and Proust function as polemical
alternatives to Nietzsche, whom they replace, and then to Freud, whom they
oppose. But Benjamin, though hardly an orthodox German theorist, does not
hesitate to align the French modernists with Marxist or psychoanalytic
discourse. [ ]But as heirs to French modernism, Benjamin and Nabokov
diverge the most strikingly in their treatment of involuntary memory and the
mnemonic image. For Benjamin as he moves from Bergson to Freud, involuntary
memory is gradually displaced from its original French context [ ] Nor
does Benjamin emphasize the mnemonic image, for when he distinguises between two
levels of involuntary memory, he insists that only a relatively superficial
layer is converned with 'isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images.'
[ ]Nothing could be further from Nabokov's basic tendendy as an
artist of memory in the yeats after Kamera Obskura. [ ] he
will show none of Benjamin's interest in setting bounds to consciousness, or in
subordinating one's personal past to a collective one. Indeed, he will
even sidestep Proust's distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory.
And, far from striving to capture an amorphous whole, he will give decisive
priority to mnemonic images marked by vivid pictorial detail. So great are
the differences between these responses to French modernism that it is hard to
imagine the two writers even agreeing on the single most importan passage in the
madeleine episode. Benjamin, with his interest in the collective past,
would probably have pointed to the introductory comment where Marcel likens his
experience to ancient Celtic belief; but Nabokov would have chose the narrator's
state of intense concentration afterwards, which reaffirms the value of
consciousness and leads to a hallucinatory vision of Combray.[ ]
Using the words of a critic to draw conclusions he had reached long before in
his own literary practice, Nabokov praised the Recherche from two separate
perspectives, a "a sequence of illustrations, of images" and as "an extended
comparison" that was essentially metaphorical (LL 208). After the vague imagism
of Mary, this sharpened
understanding of the image as both trope and sensation represents a decisive
advance in Nabokov's art of memory. He willl pursue the creation of such
'colored editions' of the past with a new urgency and precision [ ]
As a Franchophile German Benjamin oddly parallels Segelkrantz, while his
additional interest in both Jewisn mysticism and the Russian revolution suggest
a wide-ranging cultural identity just as complex as that of Nabokov, who was
seven years his junior.[ ] Beyond sharing Nabokov's sense of
Proust's primacy in the early twentieth-century literature, Benjamin agrees that
Proust belongs with Bergson in proposing a view of time and memory whose natural
form of expression can only be artistic. Bergson's Matter and Memory, he remarks,
"defines the nature of experience in the durée in such a way that the readeris
bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an
experience. Benjamin also shares Nabokov's fascination with the ambiguous
status of the Recherche, which surpasses the
established genrse by creating a structure "which is fiction, autobiography, and
commentary in one."
The two excerpts (obtained from the internet),
allowed me no other access to these two writings. However, I
think that these links might be of interest to the more resourceful N-L readers
who hapen to unfamiliar with them - should they agree with my
rather superficial connection between Nabokov and Benjamin.
................................................................................................
* - : “a copy of Gertrude Kasebier’s photographic masterpiece ‘Mother and Child’ (1897), with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?); and a similarly toned reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt’s ‘The Pilgrims of Emmaus,’ with the same, though slightly less celestial, expression of eyes and mouth.” (Pnin, 95)
**WN's note: "Two scholars who have mentioned Benjamin briefely in relation to Nabokov (mainly in order to assert their differences) were Dolinin and Foster."