There is sufficient, though perhaps not conclusive, evidence that Vladimir Nabokov devised a formula that he applied to calendar dates to show the hidden underlying actions of fate in human affairs. Simply stated, the formula is to take the calendar date in numerical form and add the numbers to arrive at a sum and then, if it is still a two-digit number, to add those two digits in order to arrive at a single numeral. For instance, May 8, 1923 would be depicted as follows:
May 8, 1923: 5-8-1923
5+8+1+9+2+3 = 28
2+8 = 1
I choose this enigmatic date to illustrate the formula where it reduces to the number “one” because it is my theory that Nabokov, who in the words of Stacy Schiff, “anointed May 8 as the day on which he had met his wife-to-be,” used this date as a sign fate intended they were to become “one” (Schiff, S. Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), NY. New York: Modern Library, 2000, 3 and endnote). To proffer such a theory of that fatidic date without overwhelming support would be met with justifiable skepticism. However, Nabokov admits he was obsessed over puzzles of this kind consistent with the “highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles” of his chess problems (Nabokov, Speak, Memory, NY, New York: Vintage International, 1989, 288). As he describes it, “inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite exact, poetical-mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up a chess composition of that sort" (288). He goes on to emphasize that “deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy” (289).
The poetical-mathematical formula can be seen in Pnin where it is presented in the form of a riddle based on Pushkin’s famous December 26, 1829 poem, “Whether I wander along noisy streets.” The solution to the riddle using the formula is shrouded in layers of diabolical deception including a narrator impersonating the author and the discrepancies between the Gregorian and Julian calendars. The fanciful notion that fate correlates with calendar dates is magical enough. The revelation of a formula that, even in a fictitious world, would allow the initiated to calculate the portents of fate would be a secret accessible only to a select few by means of a cunning artifice and deception. It is in Pnin where the formula of fate reveals that the omen of death is the number 4, a number visually represented in the real world by the chair Timofey Pnin is sitting on which mimics the formulaic code being cracked.
Nabokov told us that “in common with Pushkin, I am fascinated by fatidic dates” (Nabokov, V., Strong Opinions, NY, New York: Vintage International, 1989, 75). Speak, Memory sheds some additional light on this fascination when he describes the history behind the pre-revolutionary Russian estate of Batovo, 50 miles South of St. Petersburg neighboring on Vyra, the estate of his mother. Pushkin, accompanied by two friends, was reportedly involved in a pistol duel with the then-current owner of Batovo, Ryleev, “between May 6 and 9 (Old Style), 1820” (Speak, Memory, 62). Pushkin did not die in that pistol duel and Nabokov concluded that “for one moment fate may have wavered between preventing a heroic rebel [Ryleev] from heading for the gallows, and depriving Russia of Eugene Onegin; but then did neither” (62). Since Pushkin died in a later pistol duel and Ryleev was later hanged, Nabokov answers this historical anomaly by presenting a fatidic riddle to the careful reader of Pnin with his secret fictive formula that defies his professed “calculatory ineptitude” (Speak, Memory 13), a riddle disguised by the discrepancy between Old Style (Julian) and New Style (Gregorian) calendar dates.
During the dates that the action in Pnin occurs, from Friday, October, 1950 through February 15, 1955, there is an aura of hope for a happy ending: a singular and premonitory hope contained in the date February 15, 1955. The entire novel recounts a series of disappointments suffered by Timofey Pnin. Yet the narrator sounds a hopeful note when, on February 15, 1955, Pnin leaves Waindell, drives away with his adopted stray dog at sunrise up a “shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist. . .where there was no saying what miracle might happen” (Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin. NY, New York: Vintage International, 1989, 191). The hope for a life without suffering (or at least suffering quietly alone) appears to be fulfilled when we see again the authentic and unique Timofey Pnin on July 21, 1959 in the Rare Books room of Wordsmith College Library (Nabokov, Pale Fire, NY, New York: Vintage International, 1989, 282). It is rare for a Nabokov character (not to mention Pnin’s adopted stray dog) to live in two novels. Pnin has a happy ending. Timofey survives miraculously where many of Nabokov’s characters do not. May fate have wavered during the calendar dates in the story line of Pnin? The formula of fate constitutes a proof that fate did waver.
The race against time in Chapter One primes us to solve the more important subsequent Pushkinian fatidic date riddle by means of two false tracks. First, the riddle of what “exact day” the novel begins on cannot be accurately determined from the information given, although the reader is led to believe it is October 20, 1950. All we can say for sure is that it falls on a Friday in October, 1950. Second, the race ends with Timofey’s recollection, following his Whitchurch seizure and while listening to his introduction to the Cremona Women’s Club, of his own teenage recitation of “a poem by Pushkin” commemorating the defeat of Napoleon. The narrator, Vladimir Vladimirovich, gives us the date of 1912 for the reading, but not the name of the poem. In what I will call a “hundredth-anniversary-riddle” (to be compared with a “birthday-riddle,” “twice-the-age-riddle,” etc.),the narrator has provided clues several paragraphs earlier. There Pnin surmises he has survived his seizure and knows he is alive: he still “felt as real as his clothes, his wallet, or the Great Moscow Fire—1812” (Pnin 24). The hundredth anniversary of the Great Moscow Fire would have been the occasion for the reading of the Pushkin poem. The defeat of Napoleon after not foreseeing the awakening of the spirit of Russia shown by the immortal conflagration of Moscow leads the reader to theorize that the Pushkin poem is “Napoleon,” perhaps suggested by the next paragraph describing audience member “old Miss Herring, retired Professor of History, author of Russia Awakes (1922)” (Pnin 28). Her work was probably, as Nabokov would say, “from the sort of fatuous ‘Dawn of Russia' stuff eloquent English and American Leninists wrote in those years” following the Russian revolution while he was at Trinity College, Cambridge circa 1922 (Speak, Memory 263). We must be careful here, as Gennady Barabtarlo points out, this Herring is certainly “red” because the search for the precise poem fourteen-year-old Pnin recited is a false track (Barabtarlo, G. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989, 86). These false tracks prompt the reader to start the cognitive process of pattern recognition in the realms of dates and times. To extend the metaphor of Chapter One: these tracks may lead in the right direction, but the train of thought does not stop at the desired destination.
It is only later that we learn that Pnin is a “stickler for historical truth” (164) sufficient for him to be able to calculate the “exact date” in the year 1872 that Anna Karenina begins, “namely on Friday, February twenty-third by the New Style” (122). Keep that exact date in mind as we will come back to it.
In Chapter Three, section 3, set in 1953, we learn that Pnin’s birthday by the “Old Style” calendar is February 3, 1898 in St. Petersburg (67). A flashback to Chapter One reminds us that Pnin suffered one of his seizures on “February 15 (his birthday) 1937” (21). Note that Nabokov (or perhaps his impersonator Vladimir Vladimirovich) adds 12 days to the Old Style to arrive at the New Style, somewhat contrary to the Foreword to Speak, Memory, where he claims to add 12 days for the nineteenth and 13 days for the twentieth century (13). However, calculatory ineptitude aside, the 12-day method is confirmed by Nabokov’s going to pains to point out in Chapter Three that “Tuesday. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday—true” (67) is Pnin’s Old Style birthday and we know from (the perpetual calendar which allows us to determine precisely any day and date [see https://planetcalc.com/505/]) that February 3, 1953 fell on a Tuesday (Pnin 67). We know from section 7 of Chapter 3 that the Tuesday the narrator is talking about in February 1953 is the second Tuesday of the month because “every second Tuesday” there was a program presented at “New Hall” that Pnin attended that Tuesday (80). The second Tuesday of February 1953 fell on February 10. Nabokov uses many birthday riddles and this one has a special significance. Remember that Pnin’s Old Style birthday is February 3rd. We will come back to that date as well.
This leads us to when Pnin writes in chalk on his Elementary Russian language class blackboard the date “December 26, 1829” and then writes below it “3:03 P.M. St. Petersburg.” His point is to explicate the allusion in the “absurd” Russian grammar used in his class to the first line of Pushkin’s famous poem, “Whether I wander along noisy streets,” after which Pushkin recorded the date and time of completion of the poem. Pnin is full of mirth because he (as well as Vladimir Vladimirovich) knows of Pushkin’s fascination with fatidic dates and he knows when he died. As our narrator, Vladimir Vladimirovich relates: "In a set of eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he always had – wherever he was, whatever he was doing – of dwelling on thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain “future anniversary”: the day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his tombstone" (68).
As Timofey, now seated, “vigorously leaning” back in his chair and pointing with the chalk still in his hand at the date written on the blackboard begins to exclaim to his class “in triumph, ‘he died on a quite, quite different day! He died—‘” at which point the “chair back. . . emitted an ominous crack,” leaving the class to erupt in laughter (68). Neither Pnin nor Vladimir Vladimirovich tells us the date Pushkin actually died. The curious reader will meet Nabokov’s high expectations by looking up the date of Pushkin’s death. Pushkin died on January 29, 1837 (“Old Style”), which is February 10, 1837 in the “New Style” (“Pushkin,” Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1995, 915). Here the challenge is to the reader; as Nabokov told us in Speak, Memory, “in a first class work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world” (290). In other words, if Pushkin was inspecting “every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain ‘future anniversary’” and Timofey was emphasizing the apparent absurdity of this quest, it is Nabokov who is challenging us to solve the riddle and in the process perhaps chastising his character, the pedantic Pnin.
Here the secret formula devised by the authentic Vladimir Nabokov and concealed as a riddle in Chapter Three demonstrates that Pushkin was not fated to die at Batovo May 6-9 (Old Style)1820 but instead on the date that would be written on his tombstone when he dated his poem 12-26-1829. The reader ultimately must find and apply Nabokov’s formula of fate to the calendar dates of the poem, Pushkin’s Old-Style date of death and his New-Style date of death to solve the riddle:
Poem 12-26-1829
1+2+ 2+6+1+8+2+9 = 31
3+1 = 4
d. Old Style 1 - 29 - 1837
1+2+9+1+8+3+7 = 31
3+1 = 4
d. New Style 2 - 10 - 1837
2+1+0+1+8+3+7 = 22
2+2 = 4
Not only do the three dates result in the same sum; the chair Timofey is sitting on when pointing with his chalk and vigorously leaning as he is about to pontificate about Pushkin’s futile quest emits the “ominous crack.” The numeral 4 is emblematic visually, and mimics in the same sense the visual image in the first sentence of Chapter Four of Pnin, where a man in “a very white sports shirt open at the throat and a very black blazer, sat at a spacious desk whose highly polished surface twinned his upper half in reverse” (84). There the image is of two “Vs” point to point. Pnin’s chair, when viewed laterally with the back of the chair on the right, standing on a mirrored surface, reflects the numeral 4 below. Has the cryptogram of the future anniversary been found? Consider the following when asking if both the chair and the code were cracked.
First, there is the placement of the riddle in section 3 of Chapter Three that is easily deciphered as signifying the numerals 3:03 in the afternoon when Pushkin completed his poem. In other words, not only do the calendar dates reduced by Nabokov’s formula all equal 4, the placement in the text of the riddle at three of three (303) reinforces that the reader is on the right track. If that is not sufficiently enchanting, second, Nabokov follows with a parenthetical: "(Sometime, somewhere – Petersburg? Prague? – One of the two musical clowns pulled out the piano stool from under the other, who remained, however, playing on, in a seated, though seatless, position, with his rhapsody unimpaired. Where? Circus Busch, Berlin!)" (68). Did Timofey have the chair pulled out from under him and then ultimately succumb to gravity? Indeed, he did.
Exploring the figure of speech, “having the chair pulled out from under him,” would be quintessential Nabokov, as revealed in Speak, Memory when he jocosely refers in the third person to “the author that interested me most” –Sirin (287). Sirin (the pen name he used during his émigré years in Europe) was praised by imagined Russian readers of the time “by the fact that the real life of his books flowed from his figures of speech, which one critic as compared to ‘Windows giving upon a contiguous world . . . A rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought’” (Speak, Memory 288). The image of the chair reflected as the numeral 4 in the “contiguous” world below is an omen of death similar to the “shadow of a train of thought” as the figure of speech in the “rolling corollary,” “having the chair pulled out from under him.”
In Chapter Four, Victor plans to visit Timofey Pnin over the Easter break, 1954. His visit is delayed when, instead of traveling on Good Friday, as punishment for smoking in the attic of St. Bartholomew’s school, he must spend Friday evening with his co-conspirators listening to the sermon of the Rev. Mr. Hopper. Victor travels on Saturday, arriving at Waindell in the early evening. After stopping for dinner at the local diner, Pnin and Victor take a taxi to the Sheppard house where Pnin is renting. Coming downstairs after a hasty trip upstairs (to defenestrate the soccer ball he had unwittingly purchased for football-hating Victor), Pnin loses his footing and comes “down the last steps on his back” (108). The perpetual calendar provides the dates of the Easter weekend in 1954 ranging from Good Friday, April 16, 1954 through Easter Sunday, April 18, 1954. Pnin ends up on his backside Saturday, April 17, 1954 as the enchantment of the rhapsody of the prior year has now ended his “seated, though seatless” suspension and perhaps, as a groaning pun, epitomizing Timothy as the butt of the joke. The cracking of the cryptic code is confirmed by Timothy succumbing on the exact date of:
Saturday 4-17-1954
4+1+7+ 1+9+5+4 = 31
3+1 = 4
The “ominous crack” of the emblematic chair signifies audibly the cryptogrammic code being broken by the solution of the riddle.
Please note that Timofey “came clattering downstairs, slipped and almost fell” —a time he was simply not fated to fall—during midspring term, 1952 when asking the Clements’ permission to have his ex-wife Liza visit at their house in Chapter Two, Section 4 (43). My theory is that Nabokov, at least in a fictional setting, would eschew coincidence in favor of the agency of fate acting by covert methods in a “contiguous world” beyond what the characters or we readers naïvely perceive.
Nabokov has done quite a bit of thinking about this formula of fate, because he presents another hundredth-anniversary riddle on a “great writer’s death” in 1952 where Pnin and Vladimir Vladimirovich were participating in a “literary and artistic program” before “a large emigré audience” in New York. Again we are not given the name of the great writer, but after learning about Pnin’s “magnificent account” of “Homer’s and Gogol’s use of the Rambling Comparison” (186), it logically could only apply to Gogol who died February 21 (Old Style) 1852:
Gogol’s Death Anniversary (Old Style) 2-21-1952
2 +2+1+1+9+5+2 = 22
2+2 = 4
Twenty years after the publication of Pnin, Nabokov returns to use the “poetical- mathematical” formula as a sign in Look at the Harlequins! when the dates of death of the narrator's, Vadim Vadimovich's, first two wives and father fall on April 23, 1930, May 17, 1953 and October 22, 1898 respectively (Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! NY: New York: Vintage International, 1990, 65, 162, 96). The date of death of the narrator’s first wife, Iris, April 23, 1930 strikes the reader as significant in at least two important respects: “April 23” is Vladimir Nabokov’s New Style birthday as shown on his passport described in Speak, Memory (13) and it the first complete full date given in the text of LATH after almost a third of the duration of the time frame of the novel has elapsed—a possible clue to the puzzle contained therein. Vadim’s father, nicknamed “demon,” “died in a pistol duel” evocative of the wavering of fate, the death of Pushkin, and the very formula that is revealed in Pnin (LATH96).
For those still skeptical regarding the “exact date” theory of Nabokov’s formula of fate, consider the application of the algorithm to the “exact day” Anna Karenina began under the “Old Style.” Pnin gives the date in the “New Style”-- February, twenty-third, 1872-- from which you would subtract 12 days to arrive at the “Old Style” calendar. However, until 1918, after the Russian Revolution, Russia was still adhering to the “Old Style” when Anna Karenina was written. Therefore the date Tolstoy would have had in mind was “Old Style”:
Anna Karenina: 2-11-1872
2+1+1+1+8+7+2 = 22
2+2 = 4
Consider now Timofey’s Old-Style birthday that Vladimir Vladimirovich divulges on Tuesday, February 10, 1953, when he says that Timofey’s birthday had already “sidled by in a Gregorian disguise”:
Pnin’s birthday: 2 - 3 - 1898
2+3+1+8+9+8 = 31
3+1 = 4
Although the narrator juxtaposes Pnin’s Old Style birthday with a riddle concerning the month this particular Tuesday was in, it is another red herring to conclude that the Tuesday of Pnin’s chalk talk took place on his birthday. The narrator feigns calculatory ineptitude here because February 15, 1953 did not fall on a Tuesday, and admonishes the “Careless Reader” who, ignoring the fact that the “date he wrote had nothing to do with the day this was in Waindell” (67), may have believed the day to have been February 15, rather than February 10 (75).
Although Vladimir Vladimirovich believes “Doom should not jam” (25) even he cannot deny Timofey Pnin’s hope when “fate may have wavered” and he drives off on his birthday along the “thread of gold” (191). Although February 15, 1953 did not fall on a Tuesday, February 15, 1955 (the day the novel ends) did. It is not a coincidence in Nabokov’s fiction that there is no death in Pnin from October 1950 through February 15, 1953 just as Pushkin was not fated to die at Batovo between May 6 through May 9, 1820. Similarly, it is not a coincidence that the three significant characters in Look at the Harlequins! are fated to die on dates when the sum of the formula is 4. It is unclear whether the narrators, Vladimir Vladimirovich and Vadim Vadimovich, are privy to the secret, but it appears they are impersonations of the only one in the know: the admittedly diabolical (in the poetical-mathematical sense) author that interested Nabokov the most. Please note that Nabokov’s formula applied to February 15, 1955, that “golden thread” date, is woven by the fates into the date he met “the one” Vera Evseevna Slonim, his wife-to-be, May 8, 1923:
February 15, 1955: 2-15-1955
2+1+5+1+9+5+5 = 28
2+8 = 10
1+0 = 1
May 8, 1923: 5-8-1923
5+8+1+9+2+3 = 28
2+8 = 10
1+0 = 1
Both February 15, 1955 and May 8, 1923 fell on “Tuesday. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday—true. . .Tuesday, O Careless Reader!” (Pnin, 67, 75)
I would like to thank my colleague Darlene P. for coding the singularity when I discovered it.
--J. B. Geen, Madison Heights, Michigan