Jerry Friedman wrote: 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.
The
third reference I could check or remember appears in Kinbote's
commentaries to line 949, where Gradus "ran three steps down and nine
steps up, and burst into a circular room where a bald-headed suntanned
professor in a Hawaiian shirt sat at a round table reading with an
ironic expression on his face a Russian book. He paid no attention to
Gradus wjo traversed the room, stepped over a fat little white dog
without awakening it, clattered down a helical staircase...."
But
"our" Pnin, a rigid disciplinarian, "a regular martinet"?
Our bumbling professor who wanted to give Victor a round football ( "and with wrists and
palms he outlined a portable world. It was the same gesture he used in
class when speaking of the 'harmonical wholeness' of Pushkin.") and threw his present away not
to vex the boy after hearing from him that he disliked more athletic
pursuits?
Doubtlessly Kinbote could present Pnin somehow looking like Homer
Simpson or alter the hierarchies of German and Russian departments in
Wordsmith, but would he also disfigure Pnin's soul?
Jerry Friedman observed that "The use
of characters from one book in another is a standard device of writers
who
can be read as creating fictional worlds."
In Pnin's case what has been left of him as a "character" in PF? The
hairless domed tanned head and his pneumatic name?
Jansy