How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
But Pnin was not listening. A faint ripple stemming from his recent seizure was holding his fascinated attention. It lasted only a few heartbeats, with an additional systole here and there—last, harmless echoes—and was resolved in demure reality as his distinguished hostess invited him to the lectern; but while it lasted, how limpid the vision was! In the middle of the front row of seats he saw one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace and the blond wig she had worn at all the performances given by the great ham actor Khodotov, whom she had adored from afar before drifting into insanity. Next to her, shyly smiling, sleek dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a program. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many old friends were scattered throughout the dim hall among more recent people, such as Miss Clyde, who had modestly regained a front seat. Vanya Bednyashkin, shot by the Reds in 1919 in Odessa because his father had been a Liberal, was gaily signaling to his former school-mate from the back of the hall. And in an inconspicuous situation Dr. Pavel Pnin and his anxious wife, both a little blurred but on the whole wonderfully recovered from their obscure dissolution, looked at their son with the same life-consuming passion and pride that they had looked at him with that night in 1912 when, at a school festival, commemorating Napoleon's defeat, he had recited (a bespectacled lad all alone on the stage) a poem by Pushkin. (1.3.3)
We will admit that we are totally confused when we read this passage. Where did all these dead people come from? Right, right, the hallucination thing. Pnin has a list of dead family and friends long enough to fill a room, but do you think is list of living friends is just as long? Yep, it's pretty sad.
Quote #5
In a set of eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he always had— wherever he was, whatever he was doing—of dwelling on thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain "future anniversary": the day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his tombstone." 'And where will fate send me', imperfective future, 'death,'" declaimed inspired Pnin, throwing his head back and translating with brave literality, " 'in fight, in travel, or in waves? Or will the neighboring dale'—dolina, same word, 'valley' we would now say— 'accept my refrigerated ashes', poussiere, 'cold dust' perhaps more correct. 'And though it is indifferent to the insensible body...'"(3.3.6)
Read like this, this passage is kinda hard to follow. But it's a great view at how tough translation can be—whether you're translating a famous poet or trying to make your own self understood. Here, Pnin is teaching his students Pushkin's famous poem "Whether I Wander along Noisy Streets." You might have noticed that this poem appears many times during the novel, which is kind of weird since it's about some guy who is constantly thinking about when he (and everyone else) will die. Even babies. What you think this obsession is about?
Quote #6
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. According to the investigator Pnin had happened to talk to in Washington, the only certain thing was that being too weak to work (though still smiling, still able to help other Jewish women), she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautifully wooded Grosser Etters-berg, as the region is resoundingly called. (5.5.16)
Somehow, the multiple ways that Pnin imagines Mira dies are almost worse than the fact that she died at all. Do you think his memory of her would be different if he were certain of how she died? Would it change anything at all?