C.Kunin [ to JM's "In one of his interviews...Nabokov said :'I don't think in any language. I think in images.' [ ] Inspite of his conclusion 'that's about all', perhaps there's something else, something non-verbal, taking place in VN's ...style."]: I am very interested in the fact that VN speaks of  "thinking in images." I first heard a somewhat similar phrase ...Miss Grandin speaks of "thinking in pictures." It is in fact the title of her autobiography, Thinking in Pictures: Other Reports from My Life with Autism"...It might behoove anyone interested in the Nabokovian mind to read her book....

Jansy Mello: Actually, I was hoping to read more about "Thinking in Literature," the mysteries related to what might be Nabokov's stylistic invariants.

C.Kunin:  I was amazed to hear the song of a lark...In my childhood I used to hear a meadowlark occasionally, and once or twice when I lived in Venice in the 70's when there still were some undeveloped wetlands not far away [  ]There is a skylark in Pnin - the importance of which, if any, escapes me: "When everybody was comfortably lapping and lauding the cocktails [like cats?], Professor Pnin sat down on the wheezy hassock near his newest friend and said: 'I have to report, sir, on the skylark, zhavoronok in Russian, about which you made me the honor to interrogate me. Take this with you to  your home. I have here, tapped on the typewriting machine, a condensed account with bibliography."

 

Jansy Mello: The skylark in Pnin is part of a series of farsical misunderstandings. At first we learn that it Pnin is "not a very observant man in everyday life," but that even he, somehow, "could not help becoming aware ...that a lanky, bespectacled old fellow... — a person whom Pnin knew as Professor Thomas Wynn, Head of the Ornithology Department, having once talked to him at some party about gay golden orioles, melancholy cuckoos, and other Russian countryside birds — was not always Professor Wynn. At times he graded, as it were, into somebody else, whom Pnin did not know by name but whom he classified, with a bright foreigner's fondness for puns as 'Twynn' (or, in Pninian, 'Tvin') [   ] On the day of his party...Wynn, or his double..., suddenly sat down beside him and said:'I have long wanted to ask you something — you teach Russian, don't you? Last summer I was reading a magazine article on birds — '('Vin! This is Vin!' said Pnin to himself...) ...in the Skoff region, I hope I pronounce it right, a local cake is baked in the form of a bird. Basically, of course, the symbol is phallic, but I was wondering if you knew of such a custom?' "

However, Pnin was talking to "Tvin," the anthropologist whom he decided there and then to invite to his cocktail party, mistaking him for Prof. Wynn. When, at the end of the festivity Pnin sings out: " 'Good-bye, good-bye, Professor Vin!,' T. W. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology, exclaims: 'Now I wonder why he called me that,' " [   ] and Clements explains that their friend " 'employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular.' " The vaguely omniscient narrator (who doesn't seem to be familiar with Prof.Wynn), at first mentions "gay golden orioles...and other Russian countryside birds." before he reports on Pnin's "zhavoronok" research.

The equivocations during the cocktail are enhanced by Betty's asking Prof. Thomas "if he knew a man called Fogelman, an expert in bats, who lived in Santa Clara, Cuba." since Fogelman sounds like "Birdman" in German. I wonder if there's any other significance in Prof. Prof.Wynn's curiosities about the skylarks.

 

C. Kunin: A dip into the archives will reward the interested Nabokovian in associations of larks with madness in poems by Pushkin and Tiutchev.
Jansy Mello: If memory doesn't betray me,.there's a skylark blythely soaring and singing in Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia".  Why are they associated with madness by these Russian poets? Besides the waxwings and a swift, are there skylarks, too in VN's poems?