JM: Human stupidity is a vast and profitable subject, widely explored by artists since the earliest of times. Some of these works, like Erasmus' "The Praise of Folly," inspired social and religious reforms, but many were mere exercises in rhetoric (classed as "adoxography" - devoted to the praise of worthless subjects), or a result of sheer spite or despair. Although Nabokov's humoristic and caricatural talents fully blossomed when he started writing in English, without the gratuitous cruel strain we find in the Berlin novels, I cannot find a "right blend" in their tragic and comic elements - although he remains coherent with the distinction he makes between parody and satire. 

 

It seems that what turns Nabokov's writing into enchantment, despite the enormous space dedicated to psychopaths and monsters in lieu of the effort to constrast "the lofty and the lowly, the sacred and the profane,"* must be related to the kind of humor he cultivated. As in "Pnin," whose endless succession of caricatural disasters are as effective any cene in silent-movie comedies. Although he rides the wrong train, looses his luggage, wages war with zipper and washing-machines, slips to the ground, clatters down staircases, Pnin always comes out practically unscathed from every predicament, like his precious blue glass-bowl. And it's in this novel that a very delicate private world of love and anguish is described. Perhaps in "Pnin" there's a clue to Nabokov's type of "compassion" that's easier to find than the hem-and-hawing rationalizations about "The Barber of Kasbeam", Nabokov's rortian humanism, or HH's final repentance.  

 

Pnin's physical health is poor, also because he is prone to psychossomatic disorders. "A certain extremely unpleasant and frightening cardiac sensation, which he had experienced several times throughout his adult life, had come upon him again. It was not pain or palpitation, but rather an awful feeling of sinking and melting into one's physical surroundings — sunset, red boles of trees, sand, still air." (not a map this time).

 

And it's right then that chatty Roza Shpolyanski brings up the name of Mira Belochkin, Pnin's first love, causing a strain of painful recollections to take hold of him. His most pungent remembrances are not a consequence of any direct loss nor are they related to a witnessed event. And they are surrounded by the careful ennumeration of cotidian details (similar to John Shade's love vows to Sybil's trivially unique gestures), before it all ends in farce ('Russia — the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.'). And yet, and yet ...what a complicated lament arises when the narrator (?) concludes that "no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget -"** because, after all, earthly life unfolds in a world where such things are possible, in which they do happen and conscience and consciousness subsist, inspite of Pnin's disabling kind of forgetfulness.

 

 

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* - When "the tragic and the comic, the lofty and the lowly, the sacred and the profane, the metaphysical generalization and the physical detail, and so forth are pleasingly mingled" we get "a romantic epic" ( EO, Nabokov's commentary to Pushkin Six,XXIII,  p.35, extracted from its context).

** -"Two kerosene lamps cosily illuminated the porch of the country house. Dr Pavel Antonovich Pnin, Timofey's father, an eye specialist, and Dr Yakov Grigorievich Belochkin, Mira's father, a paediatrician, could not be torn away from their chess game in a corner of the veranda, so Madam Belochkin had the maid serve them there...their glasses of tea in silver holders, the curd and whey with black bread, the Garden Strawberries, zemlyanika, and the other cultivated species, klubnika (Hautbois or Green Strawberries), and the radiant golden jams, and the various biscuits, wafers, pretzels, zwiebacks...Dr Belochkin's blind hand took a pretzel; Dr Pnin's seeing hand took a rook. Dr Belochkin munched and stared at the hole in his ranks; Dr Pnin dipped an abstract zwieback into the hole of his tea...Timofey Pnin was again the clumsy, shy, obstinate, eighteen-year-old boy, waiting in the dark for Mira — and despite the fact that logical thought put electric bulbs into the kerosene lamps and reshuffled the people, turning them into ageing émigrés and securely, hopelessly, forever wire-netting the lighted porch, my poor Pnin, with hallucinatory sharpness, imagined Mira slipping out of there into the garden and coming toward him among tall tobacco flowers whose dull white mingled in the dark with that of her frock. This feeling coincided somehow with the sense of diffusion and dilation within his chest. Gently he laid his mallet aside and, to dissipate the anguish, started walking away from the house, through the silent pine grove....He remembered the fads of his and Mira's youth, the amateur theatricals, the gipsy ballads, the passion she had for photography. Where were they now, those artistic snapshots she used to take — pets, clouds, flowers, an April glade with shadows of birches on wet-sugar snow, soldiers posturing on the roof of a box-car, a sunset skyline, a hand holding a book? He remembered the last day they had met, on the Neva embankment in Petrograd...history broke their engagement...Sometime in the early thirties, Pnin...one night, at a Russian restaurant ...he saw Mira again. They exchanged a few words, she smiled at him in the remembered fashion...and the slenderness of arm and ankle were unchanged, were immortal, and then she joined her husband ...but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall....Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin — not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget — because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood... '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,' as 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, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.' (Ch 5)"

 

***- For the sheer direct pleasure of re-reading it:

"He worked very slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that might have been taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical man. He gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a pitcher which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one by one and wiped them all over again. He groped under the bubbles, around the goblets, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of forgotten silver — and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin rinsed it, and was wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow slipped out of the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He almost caught it — his fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge.

Pnin hurled the towel into a comer and, turning away stood for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. A quiet, lacy-winged little green insect circled in the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin's glossy bald head. He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his household work."