Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Self-Conscious Paralepsis in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin and "Recruiting" Author(s): Leona Toker Reviewed work(s): Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 7, No. 3, Poetics of Fiction (1986), pp. 459-469 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772506 . Accessed: 11/02/2012 13:40
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SELF-CONSCIOUS PARALEPSIS IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S PNIN AND "RECRUITING"

LEONA TOKER
English, Hebrew University

And it will touch the heart of someone Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, 2, XL. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957) and short story "Recruiting" (1935) provide a test for some categories suggested in Genette's Figures III (1972).1 The two works are characterized by a narrative about-face: the narrators begin by seeming omniscient (or, in Genette's terms, "extradiegetic") yet eventually turn out to be fleshand-ink inhabitants of the fictional world, that is, "intradiegetic" (Genette 1972:238) narrators who have boldly overstepped the limits of their competence. This technique can be accounted for as Nabokov's developing the potentialities inherent in two other narrative modes, both easily describable in Genette's terms. The first of these is the phenomenon of "paralepsis" (Genette 1972:211): the narrative temporarily deviates from the dominant focalization and provides more information than is available to the focal character. Paralepsis ranges from the focal characters' detailed accounts of episodes about which they heard from others but which they did not witness themselves (e.g., in Defoe's Moll Flanders or Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights) to their invention or imaginative reconstruction of episodes on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone (e.g., in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!). Whereas in the case of paralepsis the intradiegetic narrators usurp the prerogatives of omniscience, in the instances of the other tech1. For a discussion of the applicability of these categories to Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight see Rimmon (1976:489-512). Poetics Today, Vol. 7:3 (1986) 459-469

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nique with which Nabokov toys in Pnin and "Recruiting," the omniscient narrator makes a temporary pretence of relinquishing these prerogatives and of rubbing shoulders with his characters by shifting the focus upon an anonymous "I" who appears on the diegetic level. This technique is evident in the "German chapters" of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, where the omniscient narrator seems to identify himself with an Englishman who observes Amelia Osborne in Pumpernickel, or at the beginning of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, where the narrator seems to be among young Bovary's classmates. A character who participates in the diegetic level of action is subject to common limitations of human perception: inside views of other characters are beyond his reach otherwise than through conjecture which is, by definition, unreliable. However, in Vanity Fair and Madame Bovary, the narrators' seeming descent from the extradiegetic to the diegetic level does not invalidate the inside views and other information provided elsewhere in the two novels. In other words, the narrating voice is always felt to be that of an extradiegetic omniscient narrator not generally identifiable with the diegetic "I" or "we" to whom the focus is attributed for a rather brief while. The blocks of information not accessible to this "I" (or "eye") are therefore not felt to be paraleptic, and their reliability is a matter of that willing suspension of disbelief which characterizes the reading of omniscient narratives. One may note that Nabokov adopts this procedure for his 1964 English version of The Defense, where, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary,2 first-person plural is used in the account of a classroom scene, as though the novel were narrated by a Russian equivalent of the Aubrey McFate who appears in the middle of Lolita's Ramsdale classlist. In Pnin and "Recruiting" Nabokov performs a synthesis of the above two opposite tendencies. The seemingly omniscient stretches of the narrative in both the novel and the short story do turn out to be paraleptic. This is due not to the larger relative length of the "first-person" narrative blocks but to the intradiegetic narrators' avowed responsibility for the pseudo-omniscient passages as well as to their admission (direct in "Recruiting" and oblique in Pnin) of their cognitive unreliability. The paralepsis of Pnin and "Recruting" is as self-conscious as that of Absalom, Absalom!,3 yet, as it will be

2. See Nabokov (1964:47-48). This shift to the first-person plural does not occur in the Russian version of the novel (Zashchita Luzhina, 1930). It must be noted that by the time Nabokov revised the English translation of the novel he had already had a chance of mentioning this experimentation with the point of view in Madame Bovary to his students; see Nabokov (1980:151). 3. Most of the story-tellers in Absalom, Absalom! are aware that they are creating, "out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere" (Faulkner 1936:303).

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shown below, unlike that of Absalom, Absalom!, it is also selfcancelling. The analysis of Nabokov's technique must also base itself, however, on the rather unique critical notion of the artist's own coinage. This is the notion of the "main structural idea" (Nabokov 1944: 148). The word "idea" suggests that the narrative structure is rooted in the theme or in the mimetic contents of a work of fiction, that is, that the structure (both as the peculiarities of the sjuzet and as the patterning of the fabula) is a metaphor4 of which "the main structural idea" is an explication. As any explication, it cannot be formulated with scientific conciseness, but it can be given a provisional name. Thus, pervasive ambiguity is the structural idea of Invitation to a Beheading (see Toker 1982) and "Terra Incognita," the resemblance and the difference between life and text is the structural principle of The Defense and "Signs and Symbols," and the systole-diastole rhythm is the structural principle of Bend Sinister and "Cloud, Castle, Lake." The main structural idea of "Recruiting" and Pnin is, to quote the latter, that of a "quest [that] overrides the goal" (P: 143).5 Of these two works, "Recruiting" is a more concentrated study of self-conscious paralepsis as vehicle of the narrator's quest. This story may be compared to a young painter's etude which is overtly devoted to developing a skill later to be implemented in a major picture and half-concealed by its own perfection.6 In "Recruiting" the structural experimentation is not only more radical than in Pnin but also practically laid bare. 1. The protagonists of both works are characters in flight from authors. The shabby fat old gentleman who is helped off a tram and sits down on a bench in a little street garden leaves rather soon after the narrator of "Recruiting" places himself on the bench beside him. The stranger seems to be exactly the kind of episodic character whom the narrator needs for a novel he is working on. He names him Vasiliy Ivanovich (V.I.) and, in a flash, dreams up a whole life story for him. Eventually, however, he admits having taken liberties with the image of the stranger on the bench, and by the time the stranger walks away the reader is awakened from the narrator's dream. The narrator of Pnin seems to be familiar with the main events of the protagonist's life. Having met Pnin many times and having ultimately replaced him at the Waindell College, the setting of the
4. Cf. Zeller's (1974:280-290) excellent discussion of the metaphorical function of fabula patterns in Nabokov's Ada. 5. Here and below the abbreviation P indicates that the reference is to Pnin (Nabokov 1957). The abbreviation R indicates that the reference is to the text of "Recruiting" as it appears in Nabokov (1975:101-110). 6. Cf. Naumann (1978:9).

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novel's central action, the narrator claims authority on Pnin's biography. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that most of the information that he presents with the confidence of an omniscient narrator is, in fact, paraleptic and unreliable.7 Unlike his counterpart in "Recruiting," the narrator of Pnin does not directly acknowledge his lack of cognitive reliability, leaving it for the reader to infer with some help from Pnin, who denies the accuracy of the narrator's memories (P:180), accuses him of being a "dreadful inventor" (P:185),8 and hastily departs from Waindell in order to avoid him. 2. The details that furnish the experience ascribed to the protagonists are borrowed from the episodes in which the focus is attributed not to the protagonists but to the narrators. The narrator of "Recruiting" honestly confesses to his use of close-at-hand material:
Professor D.'s obituary occupied a prominent place in [my newspaper], and that is how, in my hurry to give V.I.'s morning some sort of setting as gloomy and typical as possible, I happened to arrange for him that trip to the funeral, of the even though the paper said there would be a special announcement date; but, I repeat, I was in a hurry, and I did wish he had really been to the cemetery, for he was exactly the type you see at Russian ceremonies abroad (R: 108).

The narrator of Pnin likewise places the protagonist into situations where he is observed behaving "in character," for example, buying a soccer ball for his ex-wife's son or visiting friends at their summer house. We are not told explicitly that Pnin's Waindell life is cryptographically woven out of the narrator's scant eye-witness information, but this can be inferred, for instance, from the following connections: a. The young clerk at the Whitchurch bus station, who prematurely takes his wife to a maternity hospital, is named Bob Horn in memory, as it were, of Robert Karlovich Horn, the estate steward whom the narrator has seen applauding at the wrong moments during young Pnin's amateur theatricals. b. Pnin's "passionate intrigue" (P:40) with Joan's washing machine, that on one occasion tears his rubber-soled white canvas shoes, seems to be inspired by the toy monoplane with linen wings and a rubber motor that the narrator has spotted in Pnin's St. Petersburg schoolroom. Like the washing machine, the monoplane would produce "fascinating thick tworls" (P:177) when wound up. c. The motif of Pnin's struggles with routes and time-tables can be traced to his ducking to double-check the numbers of Manhattan streets during a bus ride that he takes in the company of the narrator (P:186). Incidentally, this episode is reminiscent of V.I.'s tram ride
7. Cf. Moody (1976:73-77). 8. For a more detailed discussion of the narrative structure of Pnin see Toker (1983).

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from the funeral, with a fellow emigre present on the crowded vehicle, while the scene on the bench in "Recruiting" seems to foreshadow Pnin's heart attack in the small, "formal and funereal," city park of Whitchurch (P:19-25). d. Pnin's fascinating scholarly harangues seem to stem from the same episode, because during the bus ride Pnin has regaled the narrator with "the magnificent account of everything he had not had sufficient time to say at the celebration on Homer's and Gogol's use of the Rambling Comparison" (P:186).9 Thus the narrators of both Pnin and "Recruiting" compete with the protagonists for the focalization of the paraleptic episodes. The images that build up the experience of the protagonists are taken from the experience of the narrators. 3. The narratives of both "Recruiting" and Pnin justify the doubts that one may entertain concerning the cognitive reliability of the paraleptic passages. The narrator of "Recruiting" admits that his imagination conflicts with the "historical truth:" Professor D.'s funeral, from which the narrator imagines his V.I. having just arrived, has not yet taken place: the old man on the bench must have spent his morning in a different way. The narrative of Pnin conflicts with the calendar. For instance, February 15 is Tuesday in both 1953 and The narrator, 1954, which is impossible (see Moody 1976:76-77). however, does not call our attention to this slapdash chronology. He does warn us that something is amiss, yet the gentle admonition "O Careless Reader!" (P:75) may be understood as applying to scores of cross references that we cannot possibly register on the first or even on subsequent readings. What the narrator of Pnin disguises from us with an even greater success is the fact that he tampers not only with the relative trivia of Pnin's daily existence but also with the supposed backbone of his biography. For instance, we have no way of knowing whether Pnin has really been in love with Mira Belochkin or whether the romance exists only in the mind of the narrator who apparently links the last name of the "slender-necked, velvet-eyed girl" (P:179; Belochkin is derived from the Russian diminutive for "squirrel") with the stuffed squirrel that he has glimpsed through the open door of young Pnin's schoolroom (P:177). Significantly, the world that the narrator creates for Pnin is populated by a multitude of squirrels, apt and agile exponents of the motifs out of which Pnin's character is spun (cf. Nicol 1971:198-200). Pnin's dialogue with Madame seems to confirm the fact Shpolyanski at The Pines (P:131-32)
9. I suspect that the contents of this harangue may be found in the chapter on "The Homeric Simile in Dead Souls" in Proffer (1967:67-94), just as Pnin's comments on Anna Karenin (P:122 and 129-130) may be found, in a more detailed form, in Nabokov (1981: 190-198).

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of the youthful romance, yet the episode is paraleptic and, for all we know, it may be just another figment of the "dreadful inventor's" imagination. The narrator of "Recruiting" builds the biography of his protagonist in a similar way and is quite frank about it. He tells us that due to V.I.'s resemblance to a certain Moscow lady he has turned the stranger into the lady's brother. After this initial impulse, the rest of the imaginative canvas unfolds itself with "irrepressible detail" (R:108). The narrator pictures to himself what it would feel like to have lived with and to have loved such a sister, just as the narrator of Pnin seems to imagine what it would feel like to have been in love with and to grieve for Mira Belochkin. Both the raconteurs proceed along the lines suggested by another of Nabokov's narrators, the protagonist-narrator of "Spring in Fialta," who says, "Were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth" (Nabokov 1958:24). 4. The distribution of material in the short story likewise prefigures that of the novel. At the beginning the narrative seems to be omniscient, the protagonist is treated as a regular character and impresses the reader with the pathos and dignity of his life. Thus, the opening of the story parallels the first six chapters of Pnin, which also seem to be presented by an omniscient narrator. However, in both the story and the novel, these spells of illusion are perforated by veiled cryptic hints at the presence of an intradiegetic narrator. The narrator of Pnin unexpectedly claims to have helped Pnin write a letter to a newspaper, to have, perhaps, influenced an aunt of his to smooth Pnin's migration from France to America, and to have visited The Pines. These remarks lay the ground for the narrator's appearance on the forestage in Chapter 7. In "Recruiting" the narrator likewise refers to himself in the first person in the midst of seemingly omniscient narrative: there was an old refugee [...], a non-practicinglawyer, who had also returned from the cemetery and was also of little use to anyone except me (R:104). This odd intrusion prepares us not only for the narrator's eventual dramatic entrance upon the scene but also for his wish to use "Vasiliy Ivanovich" as copy for his novel. 5. On a repeated reading, the presence of the first-person narrators in the pseudo-omniscient passages is felt even more strongly. Thus, in "Recruiting," the warm July wind that blows during Professor D.'s funeral is described as "joyous" (R:104) which sharply contrasts with the contrite mood of the scene.1? Indeed, this case of pathetic
10. The contrast is even more forceful in the Russian text where the wind is described as schastlivyi ("happy"); see Nabokov (1956:120).

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fallacy can be explained only as the narrator's "inadvertent" (a flower that looks like a flaw, to paraphrase "The Vane Sisters," see Nabokov 1975:230) projection of his own sudden influx of happiness upon the imagined scene. In Pnin the narrator indirectly signals his presence by an interesting linguistic inconsistency. Reluctant to render the full extent of Pnin's misery after Liza's brief visit to Waindellville, the narrator infuses the subsequent dialogue between Pnin and Joan Clements with elements of parody that he seems to have borrowed from the ignorant Jack Cockerell. Among other things, he ("inadvertently"?) makes Pnin say "viscous and sawdust" instead of "whisky and soda" (P:59). No Russian could possibly make such a mispronunciation (the Russian word for "soda" sounds very much like the English one), yet the betrayal of linguistic verisimilitude is obviously intentional, since it sharply contrasts with the virtuoso handling of the bilingual situation in other parts of the novel. The narrator is clowning in order to distance himself from the character's pain and escape the grip of "participative emotion" (Nabokov 1980:95). 6. Both the novel and the short story end by cancelling their protagonists and their narrators. The protagonist of "Recruiting" is cancelled as soon as the narrator admits that he has merely imagined an identity for a total stranger who is, perhaps, not even a Russian. The narrator's earlier observation on "the mark of death" already on Vasiliy Ivanovich (R:105) applies not only to the man's physical condition but also to his fate as a short lived Nabokovian "galley-slave" (Nabokov 1973b:95), especially since the Russian title of the story, "Nabor," means not only "recruiting" but also "typesetting." And indeed, as V.I. turns back into a stranger, his fictional identity dies, dissolving, like the title character of Nabokov's "Vasiliy Shishkov," into the book about him. This book, however, is not the unfinished novel by the narrator, where the shabby old man is destined to appear "for a moment in the far end of a certain chapter, at the turning of a certain sentence" (R:110), like one of Gogol's homunculi (see Nabokov 1944:76-84), but the book in which V.I. will live on as a character of V. Sirin's11 completed story. "Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark" (Nabokov 1973a:8). The protagonist of Pnin also dissolves when the narrative reminds us of his fictionality. The information that the narrator presents to us about Pnin falls into two parts: the eyewitness reports, or the seemingly documentable data, and the paraleptic episodes that complement them. In Chapter 7, however, Pnin denies even the supposedly reliable first-hand information (see also Grams 1974: The narrator's cognitive unreliability then appears to 193-195).
11. Nabokov's pre-war pen-name.

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extend even to his "hard facts," and as the reader wonders what, after all, is the truth about Pnin and what is invention, he is forced to realize that this .does not really matter because everything, including Pnin himself, is an invention - of the narrator, or of the novelist, or of both. Like most of the techniques Pnin shares with "Recruiting," this method of dismissing the character is much less straightforward than the direct admissions of the narrator of the short story. The novel, however, does not surpass the story in the subtle obliqueness with which it cancels the narrator himself. In Pnin the reader is reminded of the fictionality of the narrator when denied unambiguous clues to his identity. It has been suggested (Carroll 1974:216n) that the narrator of Pnin is a fictional extension of Nabokov, the author, the Vladimir Vladimirovich whom Pnin suspects of using etymology as a pose (P:128). This hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the narrator is described as an Anglo-Russian novelist, a fascinating lecturer, who would be seen in Paris before the war and who migrated to America at about the same time as Pnin. Yet this description also suits another candidate for the role of the narrator of Pnin, namely, Vadim Vadimich, the protagonist-narrator of Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins!. Vadim Vadimich is mentioned in Pnin as one of the people whom Pnin had known for many years and whom he would always address by name and patronymic (P:105). Moreover, a loose-end phrase with an uncharacteristically garbled syntax tells us that Pnin has been confusing some people's identities in the past, just as he confuses Professors Wynn and Thomas at Waindell:
For recalling certain duplications in the past - disconcerting likenesses he alone had seen - bothered Pnin told himself it would be useless to ask anybody's assistance in unraveling the T. Wynns (P: 150).

When the irritated Pnin imputes to the narrator stories that the latter seems to have never told (P:185), it may indeed seem that Pnin is confusing the narrator with a "t. wynn," just as later, in Look at the Harlequins! (like the protagonist of The Gift, Nabokov was definitively capable of remembering his future work), different characters keep confusing Vadim Vadimich with the author of Lolita, warning the reader, as it were, against such a mistake. To the very end, therefore, it cannot be decided whether the narrator of Pnin is Vladimir Vladimirovich or Vadim Vadimich, or both, or neither, and we must admit that he is but another fictional character who "spirits himself away at his farewell performance" (Nabokov 1960:7). The disappearance of the narrator at the end of "Recruiting" is also half-concealed and half-revealed. Whereas by the middle of the story Vasiliy Ivanovich dissolves and turns into "Vasiliy

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Ivanovich," by the end of the story the "I" turns into "my representative" (R:110), a third-person character. Both these transformations happen when the two characters, one after the other, occupy a certain place on the bench, where the shade of a "cool linden pattern" ripples across their foreheads (R:110). It is this shade of a linden branch that the narrator has imagined gliding across the name on the grave of V.I.'s sister, "erasing it" (R:103), so that she remains nameless throughout the story (cf. Nabokov's method of writing with the help of erasor-capped pencils). Vasiliy Ivanovich is likewise "erased" soon after he seats himself on the bench under the linden shade, for it is then that the narrator breaks the spell by coming out of the shadier recesses of the garden. As the stranger walks away, "my representative" moves over to his place in the same shade, thus returning to les ombres whence he has originally emerged. The two loops of the spiral are thus complete. It is interesting to note that the "representative's" taking over of the old man's place on the bench symbolically prefigures - perhaps by a "chance that mimics choice" (Nabokov 1975:230) - the ending of Pnin, where the narrator takes over Pnin's job at Waindell. Moreover, the fact that, for once, the narrator of "Recruiting" does not seem to notice the connection between the "actual" linden shade in the street garden and the imagined one in the cemetery anticipates the narrative method of Pnin. One may, however, wonder whether the narrator of the story is indeed the man with the newspaper, or whether he may be a still third person who notices (or imagines) one man taking the place of another on a garden bench, and, wishing them both to share an unaccountable wave of happiness, uses the one with the Russian newspaper as his "sifting agent" (Nabokov 1980:98). The structural principle at work in the story would then be reminiscent of that in Gogol's "The Nevsky Avenue," where the narrator seems to witness a meeting between two young men in the street and to compose symmetrical stories about them, stories that are presented with the authoritativeness of an omniscient narrator but may also be interpreted as paraleptic objectification of the intradiegetic narrator's meditations while walking along the Nevsky Avenue.12 Such an interpretation does not clash with the above comparison of "Recruiting" with Pnin, since the imaginative processes through which the narrator of Pnin seems to be composing the protagonist's biography should in no way be identified with Nabokov's own imaginative procedures in writing the novel. In fact, the ways of the narrator's imagination
12. Thus, the narrator of "The Nevsky Avenue" may be understood as occupying middle ground between the extradiegetic narrator of Vanity Fair, who pretends to appear on the diegetic level, and the intradiegetic narrator of Pnin, who almost successfully sustains the pretense of omniscience for the length of six out of the novel's seven chapters.

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are a theme which, in both the novel and the story, competes with that of the protagonist's coping with exile. In the story the competition ends in a tie, whereas in the novel the theme of the narrator's imagination is somewhat played down, perhaps because it has already been elaborated before. Moreover, in Pnin this line of interest is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end: its purpose is to emphasize that the experience that the narrator attributes to Pnin may, in fact, be true for "you, and me, and him over there" (Nabokov 1959:25). The seed of such an effect is also present in "Recruiting." Here the narrator is looking for an episodic character to pass through his novel, whereas in Pnin the narrator is searching for the protagonist's "real life." At the end both the goals and both the pursuers are cancelled, yet there remains the quest, as well as unexpected discoveries. The narrator of "recruiting" rediscovers the sudden "swell of happiness, that immediately transforms one's soul into something immense, transparent and precious" (R:105). He fosters the belief that this sensation is not unique, that the old man on the bench is sharing it despite all the vicissitudes of his existence. And this belief seems justified, not because the stranger takes off his hat as though greeting the narrator's thought (cf. the symbolic signs of consent in Nabokov's "A Nursery Tale"), but because his eyes are roaming over all the right objects, "from a cloud traveling in one direction to a truck traveling in the other, or from a female sparrow feeding her fledgeling on the gravel to the intermittent, jerky motion of a little wooden automobile pulled on a string by a child" (R:108) and also because the wave of happiness is attributed to Vasiliy Ivanovich two pages before the illusion of the narrative omniscience is erased. It does not really matter whether the man on the bench has indeed let his love of life rise Phoenix-like from its ashes at the sight of a summer scene, whether he has felt, together with Pnin, that amidst all the pain "there is something in me and in life -" (P:58). What matters is that the reader recognizes this feeling and shares the narrator's wish to have the old stranger partake in it. It is not even necessary to determine whether the joy of the narrator of "Recruiting" is the joy of literary inspiration, as he seems to think, or whether it is the kind of response to nature that accounts for Nabokov's eventual perfect integration into the American tradition as shaped by Emerson and Thoreau. The joy of creation merges with the joy of perception - and whose creation is it anyway? Nor does it matter whether the narrator is not merely projecting his own happiness upon the man on the bench beside him. On re-reading Pnin it also becomes apparent that the narrator keeps projecting his own thoughts and emotions upon the protagonist, without, however, admitting this procedure. The genuineness of Pnin's inner life (from which outsiders, including the narrator, are supposed to be

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strictly banned) suggests that the narrator is bestowing on the protagonist something of himself: his own struggle to retain sanity in the face of obscure feelings of guilt, his own resilience and undemonstrative love of life, his attempts to cope with exile and the approaching old age, his need for privacy, and his passion for scholarly research. And yet, for all we know, Pnin may indeed share all this experience with the narrator, just as the old man on the bench may indeed share the sudden happiness of the narrator of "Recruiting." And as both the plots, both the protagonists, and both the narrators are distanced and dismissed, it is this shared and recognizable experience that remains with the reader, an experience that punctures the fabric of the imagined world and provides us with a glimpse of something which is beyond that fabric and within ourselves.
REFERENCES Carroll, William, 1974. "Nabokov's Signs and Symbols," in: Carl R. Proffer, ed. A Book of Things about VladimirNabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis), pp. 203-217. Faulkner, William, 1936. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House). Genette, Gerard, 1972. Figures III (Paris: Seuil). Grams, Paul, 1974. "Pnin: The Biographer as Meddler," in: Carl R. Proffer, ed. A Book of Things about VladimirNabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis), pp. 193-202. Moody, Fred, 1976. "At Pnin's Center," Russian Literature Triquarterly 14, 70-83. Nabokov, Vladimir, 1944. Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions). 1956 Vesna v Fialte i drugie rasskazy [Spring in Fialta and Other Stories] (New York: The Tchekhov Publishing Ilouse). 1957 Pnin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company). 1958 Nabokov's Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company). 1959 Invitation to a Beheading (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons). 1960 Laughter in the Dark (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions). 1964 The Defense (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons). 1973a Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill). 1973b Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill). 1975 Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill). 1980 Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich). 1981 Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich). Naumann, Marina, 1978. Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920s (New York: New York UP). Nicol, Charles, 1971. "Pnin's History," Novel 4, 197-208. Proffer, Carl R., 1967. The Simile and Gogol's Dead Souls (The Hague: Mouton). Rimmon, Shlomith, 1976. "Problems of Voice in Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature (PTL) 1, 489-512. Toker, Leona, 1982. "Ambiguity in Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading" (Abstract of the paper presented at the conference on Ambiguity in Literature and Film at Florida State University in Tallahassee, January 30, 1981), The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter 8, 49-51. 1983 "Pnin: A Story of Creative Imagination," to appear in the Nabokov issue of Delta. Zeller, Nancy Ann, 1974. "The Spiral of Time in Ada," in: Carl R. Proffer, ed. A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis). pp. 280-290.