Prepared for his Party

What to say about “Pnin”?  I must have been twenty-four when I read it the first time?  I seem to recall sitting at my modest wooden breakfast table that I’d secured from my grandmother, there in my third floor walk-up tenement on the exposed corner of Pitt and Delancey next to the interminable roar of the Williamsburg Bridge thinking that it was distilled and remarkable.  My best friend and suggested it with a knowing nod and as promised it seemed to glow, sentence, by sentence.  Was that me, sitting there later than night reading it on the Terrace at the Village Gate, listening to Junior Mance, waiting for a friend to get off work, accompanying Nabokov's Professor Pnin as he prepared for his party?

This time I’m reading it to my older daughter.  Sentences still glow but perhaps a bit less brightly.  I seem to discount the passages about butterflies knowing he was lepidoptrist. The reflections on the protagonists progression: an émigré en route from St. Petersburg to France to Massachusetts, feels a bit flat as it so closely mirrors his own life.  The suburban, early 1950’s insulated, academic banter makes me both melancholic for something I miss while at the same time and glad to be rid of it. 

Today, we were driving down the airport expressway, as always.  Traffic merciful, driver quiet, professional, sun and sky stereotype-defying.  What does 'Pnin' and his soirée mean to my daughter?  It can’t exactly remind her of much.  But then if I read a nineteenth century novel it ‘reminds’ me of something as well.  My brain posits me there as I imagine there to be.  The 1950’s for her must be like the 1920’s for me.  I knew people who lived the in the 1920’s.  I could imagine my grandmother and her table in the 1920s.  But another generation further, call it the 1890’s, now that must surrender to the mists of imagination and grainy photos and lore of who did what, where.

I don’t know why we ended up spending so much time with the Russians, my older daughter and I.  We cold certainly to a lot worse. Recently she expressed a strong interest in the country, which strikes her as exotic.  This despite the many years we invested in the firm Russian piano teacher whom we had visit our house week after week after week.  And as with any place one has never seen, it remains exotic for me, as well.  But there are only so many more summers left that I can mandate a trip here or there, before she will be free to decide what to do with her own summers.  Perhaps next year then:  The Trans-Siberian railroad, past lake Baykal, past the numberless Stalinist train stations, across the Volga to Yasnaya Polyana and on to the Baltic, the continent traversed.  We'll need something good to read if we're six days on a train.