Literary pilgrimage …

… To Montreux — and Forever More: On Visiting the Nabokovs’ Last Home - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It had been 10 years since my last visit to Montreux. Back then, in late November 2002, my wife and I arrived in a blizzard on the evening express from Milan. This time, the weather was exceptional: transparent, sunny, windless. On such days Vladimir Nabokov, who had returned to Europe on the wings of Lolita’s stardom and lived in Montreux from 1961 until his death in 1977, liked to stroll on the promenade with a notepad in hand and a bundle of newspapers folded under his arm like a thermometer of history.