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Fwd: RE: Re: PNIN QUERIES: motuweth frisas?
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----- Forwarded message from Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com -----
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 14:53:38 -0400
From: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Reply-To: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Subject: RE: Re: PNIN QUERIES: motuweth frisas?
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Just responded to another query on this Pninian time detail. And agree with
Sherry, especially in this novel where from the earliest pages we find Pnin
consulting happily and mistakenly a train time table on which he thinks he's
found a quicker route.
Time and Pnin have their difficulties. As in Pyre (my new name for Pale Fire)
Shade wonders how we deal with the timeless afterlife -- grab a passing surd
and glide by?
Pnin never glides: The Bolshevic Revolution foisted a new and unwanted calendar
on him and his generation. Since then, nearly impoverished Pnin is braced by
free time tables, even free toothpicks and brochures. But as an intellectual,
enmeshed in myth and folk legend, he is buffeted by everyone else's more
ruthlessly pursued agendas.
VN points out (in Pyre) that the very atmosphere will devour us if we discard
our space helmet of mortality. Though Pnin's mortality, so far, remains intact
(So far. His heart, a clock itself, and not the perpetual kind, is ticking away
its finite moments in time signatures that would puzzle a Brubeck), his
consciousness is visited again and again by figures from his past. The
permeable past, for Timofey, a fabric infinitely less stubborn and intractable
than the wallpaper patterns that forced their malicious formulas (trick puzzles
-- no solutions) on his sick child's mind.
The sweethearts of his awkward youth applaud his lectures and beam lovingly at
him. Squirrels move back and forth through time, like aides de camp between the
campaigns of the young Russian Pnin, the full grown European Pnin, and the
prematurely frail water father (On the train to Cremona he is "elderly." Fifty?
Fifty-one? Ouch). Even a friend's summerhouse in Vermont wavers briefly between
old Russia and new world.
It's all timing. Speak Memory among many other things, is the story of that most
favored of artists, the one who has time on his side. Often merely the nick of
time, escaping Bolsheviks and Nazis. But also making the crucial professional
connections that time has so few of to parcel out. Nabokov found his erstwhile
friend and, for years, irreplaceable advisor, Bunny Wilson.
Pnin, always a day late and a kopek short, has friends who have the sense to
appreciate him. And the greatest victory of life, a son who has chosen him, and
values him as he should be valued. But instead of meeting the dealmakers you
need to survive, Pnin keeps meeting the Falternfals of life.
He's right on time, though, when it comes to snubbing the great one who has done
him so few favors, his Creator. Good for him.
AB
________________________________
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum on behalf of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Fri 7/8/2005 10:40 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fwd: Re: PNIN QUERIES: motuweth frisas?
In response to your "un-question" of the meaning of "motuweth frisas" in
Vladimir Nabokov's _Pnin_:
motuweth frisas is some bizarre abbreviation for the days of the week:
MOnday
TUesday
WEdnesday
THursday
FRIday
SAturday
Sunday
Don't worry, it took me a little while to figure this out. At first, I
thought it had to be nonsense. But I know that everthing VN writes has some
meaning, so I managed to figure it out and hoped that my elucidation will
help anyone else wondering about the strange Pninian vocabulary VN has
created.
Sherry
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