How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
When she first visited The Pines, in 1951, she had never seen the New England countryside before. Its birches and bilberries deceived her into placing mentally Lake Onkwedo, not on the parallel of, say, Lake Ohrida in the Balkans, where it belonged, but on that of Lake Onega in northern Russia, where she had spent her first fifteen summers, before fleeing from the Bolsheviks to western Europe, with her aunt Lidia Vinogradov, the well-known feminist and social worker. (5.2.7)
Well, it's good to know that Pnin isn't the only one who conflates the past and the present, no matter how wrong that may be. It looks like it's some kind of affliction that affects all of the Russian émigrés in the novel. Why do you think that is?
Quote #8
And, every time, one discovers new things—for instance I notice now that Lyov Nikolaich does not know on what day his novel starts: it seems to be Friday because that is the day the clockman comes to wind up the clocks in the Oblonski house, but it is also Thursday as mentioned in the conversation at the skating rink between Lyovin and Kitty's mother." "What on earth does it matter," cried Varvara. "Who on earth wants to know the exact day?" "I can tell you the exact day," said Pnin, blinking in the broken sunlight and inhaling the remembered tang of northern pines. "The action of the novel starts in the beginning of 1872, namely on Friday, February the twenty-third by the New Style. In his morning paper Oblonski reads that Beust is rumored to have proceeded to Wiesbaden. This is of course Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust, who had just been appointed Austrian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. After presenting his credentials, Beust had gone to the continent for a rather protracted Christmas vacation—had spent there two months with his family, and was now returning to London, where, according to his own memoirs in two volumes, preparations were under way for the thanksgiving service to be held in St. Paul's on February the twenty-seventh for the recovering from typhoid fever of the Prince of Wales." (5.3.5)
Besides being so ridiculous that it amazes even Pnin's Anna-Karenina-obsessed friends, this little outburst from Pnin tells us something about him. Pnin is very meticulous about time. Even though in his life, it seems that the past and present blend together, in his studies and in his fiction he wants to pin down time very precisely. As a side note, in addition to telling us a little bit more about Pnin, this is an opportunity for Nabokov to espouse his own views (which he wrote lectures about) of time inconsistencies in the famous Russian novel.
Quote #9
Roy Thayer was weakly twinkling to himself as he looked into his punch, down his gray porous nose, and politely listened to Joan Clements who, when she was a little high as she was now, had a fetching way of rapidly blinking, or even completely closing her black-lashed blue eyes, and of interrupting her sentences, to punctuate a clause or gather new momentum, by deep hawing pants: "But don't you think— haw—that what he is trying to do—haw—practically in all his novels—haw—is—haw—to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?" (6.9.1)
We'll just let you try to guess who Joan Clements is talking about here. We'll give you a hint: his initials are V.N. and he wrote a book about an aging Russian émigré obsessed with his past.