One more thing about pinyin: it's the official romanization system
of the People's Republic of China, the system that gives us, for
instance, "Mao Zedong".  In the Wade-Giles system that's "Mao
Tse-Tung", and other schemes have been used.  "Peking" is in the
Post Office "system", as I recall.

If I had my copy of /Pale Fire/ here, I'd mention the other
reference to Pnin in one of the last notes, where Gradus sees him
in the Wordsmith library reading a Russian book.  I'm in no doubt
that this is "our" Pnin, whose career has apparently advanced
greatly since we last saw him.

Somebody has probably said this in a more professional way, but
Pnin's appearances in PF go with the theme of the poem (which,
as you may recall, I've argued is the theme of the book): the
analogy between the writer's creation of a fictional world and
some Players' creation of our world.  The use of characters
from one book in another is a standard device of writers who
can be read as creating fictional worlds.

Jerry Friedman

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