The
novel Pnin,
after the scandal of Lolita,
is Chekhovian. There are some good lines on philosophy (Vintage
International Edition, p. 89), some tears of Pnin when he realizes
that he will be out of job at the university (p. 172) that reminded
me specially of a kind mind like Chekhovʼs, mentioned four pages
later, and then the last chapter, where the narrator tells us that
Pnin is mediocre and his wife a bad poetess who tried to have a
relationship with him in the past, after which he married Pnin. No
book of Nabokov is less Nabokovian as Pnin.
The result is flat, a flop, leaving our mind with the taste of
failure and its symbol: Pnin the scholar. A few yellow paragraphs underlined some twenty years ago to which I added some today, when I re-read the work, are worth mentioning. For example:
“Unless
a film of flesh envelop us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is
separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-travelerʼs
helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestement, death is
communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do
so is the end of the tender ego” (p. 20). A Nabokovian riposte
against politics and social life.
“Genius
is non-conformity” (p. 89). I rather like that other line of his
where he tells us that “Genius is an African who dreames up snow”
(The Gift,
Vintage International Edition, p. 193).
“I
never cared much for Bolotov and his philosophical works, which so
oddly combine the obscure and the trite; the manʼs achievement is
perhaps a mountain—but a mountain of platitudes” (p. 120). Lines
that can be said of many a philosophical work, and that show that
fame in academia goes with panache, character, selling yourself in a
grand way. Hegel is here the best example.
“The
three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.
ʻAll
of these are worlds,ʼ said Hagen.
ʻOr
else,ʼ said Clemens with a yawn, ʻa frightful mess. I suspect it is
really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.ʼ” This
cosmogonical thought is exactly the one we see Sebastian Knight
expressing (The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight,
Vintage International Edition, p. 137: “Years later Sebastian wrote
that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as
for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast”).
And
finally, that Nabokovian joke on existentialism and academic fraud in
psychology very common in his time and ours: “Incidentally, I am
sending you under separate cover a pamphlet published in Prague by my
friend Professor Chateau, which brilliantly refutes your Dr. Halpʼs
theory of birth being an act of suicide on the part of the infant”
(p. 183). The best thing of Pnin
is
that it is short. Now we come to the novel which I most cherish in the
Nabokovian corpus and influenced me most: Pale
Fire.
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