Pnin

Halp's theory of birth being an act of suicide on the part of the infant. I have permitted myself to correct an obvious misprint on page 48 of Chateau's excellent paper. I await your' (probably 'decision', the bottom of the page with the signature had been cut off by Liza).

4
    When half a dozen years later I revisited Paris, I learned that Timofey Pnin had married Liza Bogolepov soon after my departure. She sent me a published collection of her poems Suhie Gubï (Dry Lips) with the inscription in dark-red ink: 'To a Stranger from a Stranger' (neznakomtsu ot neznakomki). I saw Pnin and her at an evening tea in the apartment of a famous émigré, a social revolutionary, one of those informal gatherings where old-fashioned terrorists, heroic nuns, gifted hedonists, liberals, adventurous young poets, elderly novelists and artists, publishers and publicists, free-minded philosophers and scholars would represent a kind of special knighthood, the active and significant nucleus of an exiled society which during the third of a century it flourished remained practically unknown to American intellectuals, for whom the notion of Russian emigration was made to mean by astute Communist propaganda a vague and perfectly fictitious mass of so-called Trotskiites (whatever these are), ruined reactionaries, reformed or disguised Cheka men, tided ladies, professional priests, restaurant keepers, and White Russian military groups, all of them of no cultural importance whatever.
    Taking advantage of Pnin's being engaged in a political discussion with Kerenski at the other end of the table, Liza informed me - with her usual crude candour - that she had 'told Timofey everything'; that he was' a saint' and had 'pardoned' me. Fortunately, she did not often accompany him to later receptions where I had the pleasure of sitting next to him, or opposite him, in the company of dear friends, on our small lone planet, above the black and diamond city, with the lamplight on this or that Socratic cranium and a slice of lemon revolving in the glass of stirred tea. One night, as Dr Barakan, Pnin, and I were sitting at the Bolotovs, I happened to be talking to the neurologist about a cousin of his, Ludmila, now Lady D-, whom I had known in Yalta, Athens, and London, when suddenly Pnin cried to Dr Barakan across the table: 'Now, don't believe a word he says, Georgiy Aramovich. He makes up everything. He once invented that we were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations. He is a dreadful inventor (on uzhasnïy vïdumshchik).' Barakan and I were so astounded by this outburst that we just sat and looked at each other in silence.

5
    In the rememoration of old relationships, later impressions often tend to be dimmer than earlier ones. I recall talking to Liza and her new husband, Dr Eric Wind, in between two acts of a Russian play in New York sometime in the early forties. He said he had a 'really tender feeling for Herr Professor Pnin' and gave me some bizarre details of their voyage together from Europe in the beginning of the Second World War. I ran into Pnin several times during those years at various social and academic functions in New York; but the only vivid recollection I have is of our ride together on a west-side bus, on one very festive and very wet night in 1952. We had come from our respective colleges to participate in a literary and artistic programme before a large émigré audience in downtown New York on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of a great writer's death. Pnin had been teaching at Waindell since the mid forties and never had I seen him look healthier, more prosperous, and more self-assertive. He and I turned out to be, as he quipped, vos'midesyatniki (men of the Eighties), that is, we both happened to have lodgings for the night in the West Eighties; and as we hung from adjacent straps in the crowded and spasmodic vehicle, my good friend managed to combine a vigorous ducking and twisting of the head (in his continuous attempts to check and re-check the numbers of cross streets) with a magnificent account of all he had not had sufficient time to say at the celebration on Homer's and Gogol's use of the Rambling Comparison.

6
    When I decided to accept a professorship at Waindell, I stipulated that I could invite whomever I wanted for teaching in the special Russian Division I planned to inaugurate. With this confirmed, I wrote to Timofey Pnin offering him, in the most cordial terms I could muster, to assist me in