Talk:Pnin (novel)

Untitled
I changed "aristocratic" because Nabokov was from the haute bourgeoisie, not the aristocracy. I hope the same applies to Vladimir Vladimirovich N. If not, or if "landed gentry" isn't the right term, the comparison will have to be changed. &mdash;JerryFriedman 23:02, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Point of view
Why the text of some paragraphs is written in the first person? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 153.109.42.97 (talk) 00:14, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
 * If you're asking that question about the novel--as opposed to this Wikipedia article--the answer is because the novel is being narrated, and the "I" refers to the narrator. However, I believe questions about the story itself are supposed to be omitted from Wiki article discussions, being better suited to book discussion forums.Chillowack (talk) 17:45, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

pronunciation
How is the name "Pnin" pronounced? Lachatdelarue (talk) 01:35, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I think it might have described the sound at some point? From what I remember, it is pronounced "Puh-neen". Sarge Baldy 22:20, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * I had just started the book yesterday, before asking the question. So far (in the book) there have been two descriptions of the pronunciation, one being "puh-neen' and the other being just 'neen'. Which one is correct? Lachatdelarue (talk) 14:42, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * It's like the French "pneu" (as described in Pale Fire). The "p" is pronounced, but there's no vowel, or as little as possible, between it and the "n".  Good luck.  &mdash;JerryFriedman 17:49, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's a consonant cluster that English doesn't have - it's been awhile since I've read Pnin, but I think the fact that everyone mispronounces his name adds to the idea that he never quite fits in. Bamos 19:06, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
 * In the book Pnin introduces himself to the Clements:"Here speaks Professor --" There follows a preposterous little explosion- indicating that the P is pronounced, later we have also Ping-pong,Pnin?. When he is introduced as "Professor Pu-neen" fun is made of the inability to pronounce the consonant cluster.Ekem 16:04, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The expression was actually "the sound of a ping pong ball being crushed" paraphrasing, not ping pong itself. 2A02:8084:4EE0:6900:78E5:F7ED:579:4969 (talk) 10:04, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

pnin is not nabokov
pnin is not based on nabokov. pnin could be partially based on a man named marc szeftel, who taught at cornell university, but even this is questionable. the article should not suggest that nabokov is pnin.

In chapter 5/part 4 Nabakov is clearly the butterfly collector Vladimir Vladimirovich, I'd agree that he is definitely saying that he is not Pnin.


 * Nowhere in this article is it suggested that Pnin is Nabokov.


 * What is suggested is that the narrator is Nabokov.


 * Please remember to sign your posts, thanks.Chillowack (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

correction
The book's narrator, who bears many similarities to Nabokov—a landed-gentry Russian émigré past, the same given name and patronymic as the author, as well as the final initial N—gradually reveals himself as a less than disinterested observer.

Nabokov's name is Vladimir and his patronimic is Vladimirovich. NOT Timofey Pavlovich. Thus, Pnin does not have the same name and patronimic as Timofey Pavlovich Pnin.


 * Read the sentence you quoted again.

"Dr Cronin"
In chaper three of Pnin Nabokov describes a typical bookcase in a 1950's home: "Hendrik Willem van Loon and Dr Cronin were invariably present...exchanging looks of tender recognition, like two old friends at a crowded party." Vincent looks like a candidate, but his publications are maybe a tad too late... is A. J. Cronin meant? Sparafucil (talk) 11:59, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Malice?
I don't agree that Pnin bore the narrator "malice." That seems to be an exaggeration, probably based on Pnin's remark that he will never work for the narrator. The other clues to Pnin's feelings (the remark about the butterflies, his youthful comments during dinner, and his rejection of the narrator's job offer) indicate some exception to the narrator's ways, but to call it "malice" is going too far. I think this opinion should be deleted, being both editorial and inaccurate.Chillowack (talk) 17:57, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Editorializing
The paragraph about Pnin's supposed "malice" toward the narrator, and the extensive editorializing going on in this paragraph, seems much more like one person's slant on the tale than an objective description of it. This paragraph is no doubt why the article was tagged as "sounding too much like a review." I propose that this paragraph be rewritten or deleted, and if there are no objections, I will do so.Chillowack (talk) 19:05, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Removed "Multiple Issues" header
I tried to tackle the problems of this article and I think I got it to the point where it no longer needs that menacing header about having "multiple issues." Thoughts? Now I think the thing that would really improve this article would be a section about critical reception and later analysis. One good source for this is the 2004 introduction I've cited by David Lodge, for any of you editors who might be interested in taking up the torch. Tdimhcs (talk) 05:18, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

"Teeming"
In the Background section it states that ". . . it has been claimed that [the novel] is 'teeming' with people and physical details" from Cornell. I wonder if this is an echo of Edmund Wilson's proof-correction of the manuscript, in which he noted that Nabokov had "amusingly misspelled" teamed in the sentence "Pnin teemed with Madame Bolotov against Shpolyanski" during a game of croquet. (See The Nabokov-Wilson Letters.)BruceSwanson (talk) 00:47, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Plot summary
Just because Nabokov uses the word "systole" does not make these epsiodes heart attacks. They are deliberately ambiguous (possibly emanating from Mira Belochkin?) See Boyd p 281 https://books.google.com/books?id=C8lF4iqAgRQC or p30 https://books.google.com/books?id=PflkAAAAMAAJ or here https://books.google.com/books?id=BhCQwPr23LIC&pg=PA137 best description is probably "seizure" (which I am changing to). And where is the justification for the claim that "consciousness to travel back to his childhood in St. Petersburg, where he is reminded of the love of his mother and the Russian Revolution", that's just completely wrong. NPalgan2 (talk) 20:16, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Clearly Nabokov is referencing the heart. Systole is one word, but he also includes heartbeats. This is clearly distinct from a seizure, which is an ailment of the brain. Later on in Pnin: "The seizure had left him a little frightened and shaky, but he argued that had it been a real heart attack, he would have surely felt a good deal more unsettled and concerned, and this roundabout piece of reasoning completely dispelled his fear. It was now four-twenty. He blew his nose and trudged to the station" As to how his consciousness travels back:

And now, in the park of Whitchurch, Pnin felt what he bad felt already on August 10, 1942, and February 15 (his birthday), 1937, and May 18, 1929, and July 4, 1920--that the repulsive automaton he lodged had developed a consciousness of its own and not only was grossly alive but was causing him pain and panic. He pressed his poor bald head against the stone back of the bench and recalled all the past occasions of similar discomfort and despair. Could it be pneumonia this time? He had been chilled to the bone a couple of days before in one of those hearty American draughts that a host treats his guests to after the second round of drinks on a windy night. And suddenly Pnin (was he dying?) found himself sliding back into his own childhood. This sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that is said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals, especially in the former Russian Navy--a phenomenon of suffocation that a veteran psychoanalyst, whose name excapes me, has explained as being the subconsciously evoked shock of one's baptism which causes an explosion of intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last. It all happened in a flash but there is no way of rendering it in less than so many consecutive words. Pnin came from a respectable, fairly well-to-do, St Petersburg family. His father, Dr Pavel Pnin, an eye specialist of considerable repute, had once had the honour of treating Leo Tolstoy for a case of conjunctivitis. Timofey's mother, a frail, nervous little person with a waspy waist and bobbed hair, was the daughter of the once famous revolutionary Umov (rhymes with' zoom off') and of a German lady from Riga. Through his half swoon, he saw his mother's approaching eyes. It was a Sunday in mid winter. He was eleven. He had been preparing lessons for his Monday classes at the First Gymnasium when a strange chill pervaded his body. His mother took his temperature, looked at her child with a kind of stupefaction, and immediately called her husband's best friend, the paediatrician Belochkin. He was a small, beetle-browed man, with a short beard and cropped hair. Easing the skirts of his frock coat, he sat down on the edge of Timofey's bed. A race was run between the doctor's fat golden watch and Timofey's pulse (an easy winner). Then Timofey's torso was bared, and to it Belochkin pressed the icy nudity of his ear and the sandpapery side of his head. Like the flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey's back and chest, gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and stomping on to the next. No sooner had the doctor left than Timofey's mother and a robust servant girl with safety-pins between her teeth encased the distressed little patient in a straitjacket-like compress. It consisted of a layer of soaked linen, a thicker layer of absorbent cotton, and another of tight flannel, with a sticky diabolical oilcloth-- the hue of urine and fever--coming between the clammy pang of the linen next to his skin and the excruciating squeak of the cotton around which the outer layer of flannel was wound. A poor cocooned pupa, Timosha (Tim) lay under a mass of additional blankets; they were of no avail against the branching chill that crept up his ribs from both sides of his frozen spine. He could not close his eyes because his eyelids stung so. Vision was but oval pain with oblique stabs of light; familiar shapes became the breeding places of evil delusions. Near his bed was a four-section screen of polished wood, with pyrographic designs representing a bridle path felted with fallen leaves, a lily pond, an old man hunched up on a bench, and a squirrel holding a reddish object in its front paws. Timosha, a methodical child, had often wondered what that object could be (a nut? a pine cone?), and now that he had nothing else to do, he set himself to solve this dreary riddle, but the fever that hummed in his head drowned every effort in pain and panic. Still more oppressive was his tussle with the wallpaper. He had always been able to see that in the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a number of times with soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by the undismissible fact that he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of the pattern; that such a recurrence existed was proved by his being able to pick out here and there, all along the wall from bed to wardrobe and from stove to door, the reappearance of this or that element of the series, but when he tried travelling right or left from any chosen set of three inflorescences and seven leaves, he forthwith lost himself in a meaningless tangle of rhododendron and oak. It stood to reason that if the evil designer--the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever--had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his everyday health, his everyday"

Consciousness is one of the key words in Nabokov's work as cited by scholars like Boyd and Appel. I feel it is appropriate here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrawlAngry (talk • contribs) 21:02, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I have read that. More to the point, I cited 3 secondary WP:RSs who did not call it a "mild heart attack". Also, as I pointed out, the "reminded of his love for his mother and the Russian revolution" bit was wrong. NPalgan2 (talk) 21:53, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Do any of you editors realize how little you know about literature? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Steve b cooper vvv (talk • contribs) 03:03, 31 December 2019 (UTC)