C. Kunin: Thinking of Pnin, does anyone recall the
word/expression Nabokov invented to indicate the precarious state of Pnin's
existence?
Koen Vanherwegen: ..."I remember Pnin talking himself
of "impossible isolation" I can be wrong, but "isola" in Latin means island, i
seem to remember form high school The sentence falls after Joan shows him a
cartoon of a mariner washed on the shore of an island with a sirene Technically
speaking, he is speaking of the mariner on the isle, but it's clear that it
refers to his own situation too.I hope that can be of any help to
you?
JM: One of the things that puzzles me is VN's emphasis
about the smallness of Pnin's feet.
C.Kunin: Funny, I don't recall the smallness of
Pnin's feet - but his beetle-browed large domed head - that I do
recall.[ ]It's hard not to imagine someone who, knowing the Russian
language [John Bailey], couldn't worship at the feet (and I do think they were
probably small, and he certainly had a way of describing small women's feet) of
Pushkin. But Nabokov is still an acquired taste.
Matt Roth: "Pnin’s tiny feet, I have always
taken this to be a further link between Pnin and Cinderella."
JM: Cinderella, silvery shoes,
vair/vere and squirrel fur (Gogol, RLSK, Pale Fire, Ada.)
from fairy tale cum foot-fetichism in Pnin, too? Catsy Kunin,
did you relate the latter to Pushkin? (small women's feet or women's small
feet)
Here are some quotes about Professor Timofey Pnin. "Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather
impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking
an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man
torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair
of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine
feet."
Coming closer to your question about Pnin's
(and humanity's) precarious state of existence and K;Vamherwegen's
reference to "isola" (island & isolation, and I add "insulation"):
"I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the
main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops
us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings.
The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is
divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape,
but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced
was something very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and
pregnable."