#Nabokov24 #Pnin #VladimirNabokov part 2
#readinganactofsharedsolitude #paperpills🇵🇸🇱🇧❤️ #beedoubleokayess
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#Nabokov24 #Pnin part1 #VladimirNabokov
#readinganactofsharedsolitude #paperpills🇵🇸🇱🇧❤️ #beedoubleokayess
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"I want a last piece of advice from you," said Liza in what the French call a "white" voice. "This is an offer of marriage that I have received. I shall wait till midnight. If I don't hear from you, I shall accept it." She hailed a taxi and was gone.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

A few days later she sent me those poems; a fair sample of her production is the kind of stuff that émigré rhymsterettes wrote after Akhmatova: lackadaisical little lyrics that tiptoed in more or less anapaestic tetrameter & sat down rather heavily with a wistful sigh
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"Der arme Kerl," muttered kindhearted Hagen to himself as he walked homeward. "At least, I have sweetened the pill."
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Hagen, when we speak of injustice, we forget Armenian massacres, tor- tures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa... The history of man is the history of pain!"
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"Our friend," answered Clements, "employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

And to think I have stamped all these,” sighed Mrs.

Thayer, rolling her eyes in mock dismay. "Some stamped Mrs. Miller," said Pnin, a stickler for historical truth.
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We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures-when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met...
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"I think we will now transport ourselves to the other room where a supper à la fourchette is, I think, awaiting us."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

It is nine hundred ninety nine, Todd Rodd, very simple! At the very very end of the rodd, where it unites with Cleef Ahvnue. A leetle breek house and a beeg blahk cleef."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

So I take the opportunity to extend a cordial invitation to you to visit me this evening. Half past eight, postmeridian. A little house-heating soiree, nothing more. Bring also your spouse-or perhaps you are a Bachelor of Hearts?"
(Oh, punster Pnin!)

#Nabokov24 #Pnin

All of a sudden he experienced an odd feeling of dissatisfaction as he checked the little list of his guests. It had body but it lacked bouquet.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

2. at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the sub- tleties of the parley-voo.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

1. Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions
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the President of Waindell College, renowned for his use of the mot juste, had so elegantly phrased it when reviewing the European situation in a recent Commencement speech, along with the compliment he paid another torture house, "Russia-the country of Tolstoy... #Nabokov24

Aber warum-but why-" Dr. Hagen, the gentlest of souls alive, would wail, "why had one to put that horrid camp so near!" for indeed, it was near-only five miles from the cultural heart of Germany "that nation of universities,"
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

she was selected to die & was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautifully wooded Grosser Etters- berg, as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour's stroll from Weimar, where walked Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland... #Nabokov24 #Pnin

In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself,during the last 10 yrs, never to remember Mira Belochkin-not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal & brief, threatened his peace of mind but because such things as Mira's death were possible #Pnin
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but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.
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Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here," remarked Chateau. "He would have told us all about these en- chanting insects."

"I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

Next, they switched to the usual shop talk of European teachers abroad, sighing and shaking heads over the "typical American college student" who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks ed- ucation is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job.
#Nabokov24

If you forgot and called him next morning Professor Everett (his real name to you) it was (for him) a horrible insult.
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In the beginning Pnin was greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied about in America: after a single party, with an iceberg in a drop of whisky -you were supposed to call a gray- templed stranger "Jim," while he called you "Tim"
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

I'm afraid,that's all we have by this author. Strange! said Pnin. The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody-little children, full- grown people, doctors, advocates-everybody read & reread him. This is not his best book but OK, OK, I will take it.
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That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood. That Van Gogh is second-rate and Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles; and that if Degas could immortalize a calèche, why could not Victor Wind do the same to a motor car?
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something that Pnin had half heard in the course of the day, and had been reluctant to follow up, now bothered and oppressed him, as does, in retrospection, a blunder we have made, a piece of rudeness we have allowed ourselves, or a threat we have chosen to ignore.
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moving his lips in soundless comment, critical, satisfied, perplexed, and now lifting his rudimentary eyebrows and forgetting them there, left high upon his spacious brow where they remained long after all trace of displeasure or doubt had gone.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

occasions at which shy graduate students would be taught vodka-drinking rites & other stale Russianisms-he would murmur in awed self-gratitude: "Gospodi, skoľko mi im dayom! (My, what a lot we give them!)"-"them" being the benighted American people.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin

2. to infuse a magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students in an atmosphere of Mother Volga songs, red caviar, and tea
#Nabokov24 #Pnin