Stan K-Bootle addresses Jansy and Sklyarenko: “From the sublime to the ridiculous” ... is NOT strictly a PROVERB. You need to identify the two entities being compared before you can claim to be waxing proverbially! ...I think the usage too widespread to grant any significance to googled “matches,” whether from Pushkin or Freud. I also think linking horses to chestnuts to brain-shapes to VN’s lament over torture is “stretching it a bit.”

J.Mello:   Stan, I didn't "google-match" this sentence to accidentaly find it in Freud. It so happens that this episode is one of my favorites, because the patient was expressing her rejection of Freud's interpretations - when reporting her dream about a "canal" - while, at the same time, confirming them. I still think that Nabokov might have read it in Freud since it would be absurd to suppose that he took such great pains to deride Freud without being familiar with his writings about "Die Traumdeutung." 
Nabokov even read minor articles by some of Freud's followers, such as Oskar Pfister and even  Erich Fromm(cf. "Pale Fire"). Richard Rorty once observed (The Barber of Kasbeam) that "Freud was the one person Nabokov resented in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche. In both cases, it was resentment of the precursor who may already have written all one's best lines."*
 
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*-   Here I use R.Rorty's authoritative observations merely as a tease because I find this particular sentence of his superficial and unjustly depreciative..
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