Finished #Pnin
#VladimirNabokov
a heated exchange between Prof Bolotov,who taught the History of Philosophy,and Prof Chateau,who taught the Philosophy of History: "Reality is Duration," one voice,Bolotov's,would boom. "It is not!" the other would cry. "A soap bubble is as real as a fossil tooth!"
#Pnin
#VladimirNabokov
Electric devices…Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings…The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge…
And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.
I finished Nabokov's "Pnin" last night.
What a delight it was!
I would recommend getting hold of the Everyman's Library edition, as the introduction by David Lodge id both informative and perceptive.
#Books #Pnin #Nabokov #Fiction #Literature #AmericanLiterature […]
[Original post on c.im]
#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
"Der arme Kerl," muttered kindhearted Hagen to himself as he walked homeward. "At least, I have sweetened the pill."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
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!"
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
"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.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
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...
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
"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
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
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
#Nabokov24
but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
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
If you forgot and called him next morning Professor Everett (his real name to you) it was (for him) a horrible insult.
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
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
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
1.As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian ladies, scattered all over academic America, who, without hay. ing had any formal training at all, manage somehow, by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
"Impossible isolation," said Pnin. "Yes, but Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that
the world of the mind is based on a compromise with
logic."
#Nabokov24 #Pnin
