How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
This was the first time Pnin was coming to The Pines but I had been there before. Émigré Russians—liberals and intellectuals who had left Russia around 1920— could be found swarming all over the place. You would find them in every patch of speckled shade, sitting on rustic benches and discussing émigré writers—Bunin, Aldanov, Sirin; lying suspended in hammocks, with the Sunday issue of a Russian-language newspaper over their faces in traditional defense against flies; sipping tea with jam on the veranda; walking in the woods and wondering about the edibility of local toadstools. (5.2.3)
Ah, finally Pnin gets to be amongst his people. And this is the only time that we don't feel he is a foreigner. No one treats him like he's weird, and he even manages to be successful at something while he's at Cook's Castle. Sure, it's croquet, but gotta take it where you can get it.
Quote #8
Some parents brought their offspring with them—healthy, tall, indolent, difficult American children of college age, with no sense of nature, and no Russian, and no interest whatsoever in the niceties of their parents' backgrounds and pasts. They seemed to live at The Pines on a physical and mental plane entirely different from that of their parents: now and then passing from their own level to ours through a kind of interdimensional shimmer; responding curtly to a well-meaning Russian joke or anxious piece of advice, and then fading away again; keeping always aloof (so that one felt one had engendered a brood of elves), and preferring any Onkwedo store product, any sort of canned goods to the marvelous Russian foods provided by the Kukolnikov household at loud, long dinners on the screened porch. (5.2.5)
The Russian parents at The Pines have it rough. Even their kids see them as weird and boring foreigners. But do you think these kids are able to completely integrate into American society? Or are they somewhere in between their parents and the kids whose families have been living in America for centuries?
Quote #9
Consequently the sight of a hummingbird in probing flight, or a catalpa in ample bloom, produced upon Varvara the effect of some unnatural or exotic vision. More fabulous than pictures in a bestiary were to her the tremendous porcupines that came to gnaw at the delicious, gamy old wood of the house, or the elegant, eerie little skunks that sampled the cat's milk in the backyard. She was nonplused and enchanted by the number of plants and creatures she could not identify, mistook Yellow Warblers for stray canaries, and on the occasion of Susan's birthday was known to have brought, with pride and panting enthusiasm, for the ornamentation of the dinner table, a profusion of beautiful poison-ivy leaves, hugged to her pink, freckled breast. (5.2.7)
Varvara is a lady who has never been to the American wilderness before and assumes that it is just like the forests of Russia. Obviously, she's wrong. But seeing that Pnin isn't the only one who makes these kinds of mistakes helps us feel that he's not just a bumbling professor. Maybe he's just used to operating in a different country.