''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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surface of Pnin's present life into the reservoir of
accumulated pain. " 34
Pnin has lost all that mattered most to him. He has
lost his home and his country, and he has also lost
the two women. he: has loved. Liza, his ex-wife, whom he
still adores in spite of all her thoughtlessness and
cruelty, actually comes for a brief visit, only to
leave him in utter distress. But even if "recollections
of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd
out any former romance" (134-135), the memory of the'
loss of a girl he loved in his youth is even more unbearable
than that of Liza. It is not so much the separation
from Mira that haunts him but her death in a
German concentration camp. Dr. Hagen, even though "the
gentlest of souls alive" (135) perversely laments only
the fact that the camp was put so near "the cultural
heart of Germany" (135). Pnin, more imaginative and
more human, cannot cope with the thought of what happened
in that camp, no matter where it was. That was
something with which "no conscience, and hence no consciousness"
(135) can live and which he has taught himself
to ban from his memory "in order to exist rationally"
(134).
He has learnt to ban other memories as well, and
yet, from time to time, called forth unexpectedly by
the chance combination of details of scenery, by sounds
(114), by a few words he happens to be reading (75),
they crowd into his mind and re-awaken the pain that
their loss caused him. Thus, gradually, beside the
comic outer Pnin, whom the Waindell community knows