This reminded me of a favorite story of mine about Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon: Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's when he was at Cornell. Years later when Pynchon himself became famous, Nabokov told interviewers that he had no memory of Pynchon as a student. But Vera remembered Pynchon's handwriting. She really was the "course assistant" as this article mentions: she must have done the grading too.