Although I came across the above quoted sentence several times, I usually skipped it (the linkage bt "remembrance and rembrandt" was unpleasing to me) 

I thought that, this time, I could linger over it and add a comment and, perhaps, invite others. 

The same distortion that generalizes Rembrandt's paintings as "dark but festive" ( The Anatomy lesson, The Night Vigil?, The Girl with a Broom...festive?) appears in the parallel he established between "rembrandt and memory" as a "photo-studio de luxe..." Because a distortion it is. There are all sorts of "memories" as there are people who are more talented than others in the discipline of recollecting and rendering what arises as a poem, a novel, a painting, a song. "Speak, Memory" is, in fact, a "photo-studio de luxe"... Nabokov's various other happy souvenirs, lent to some of his characters in a novel, are equally luxury items.

Disordered, distressful and traumatizing remembrances are often repressed, but they remain valid mnemic registers which constantly press towards consciousness (Freud).

Repressed sexual traumas and fantasies, guilty aspirations, evil thoughts may highlight parallel events, in a most emotionally charged and artistic way, in the shape of "screen memories" (paramnesias). They automatically hide the painful event by offering extraordinarily intense and detailed, but insignificant and neutral, scenes or images. They surface in dreams and nightmares, causing insomnia. They may be responsible for various physical symptoms (such as psoriasis). They may be intuited and transformed, by an artist, into stories about split-personalities,aso.

I doubt it that Nabokov was unaware of that and, returning to a recent discussion about VN's insistent rejection of Freud, this might have been one of the chief motivatons for his opposition to the Viennese (who was as Viennese as Mozart or Beethoven were). The vividness of the paramnesia would have added spice to VN's creation and, admitting that would have been rather distasteful to him.

Besides, VN always wanted to be in control of his recollections, life and art. Freud's deterministic "unconscious", if accepted, might have represented a blow to VN's project of being autonomous and free. 

Jansy Mello .