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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Some now doubt the veracity of Field's account, given the state of the index cards on which this and similar information had been jotted. Field's Nabokov archive has been recently auctioned, and a thorough study ofhis notes may eventually shed further light on the episode. I am grateful to Brian Boyd for sharing his observations with me concerning both the incident and Field's records of it. See Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art ofVladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986), p. 291. See also Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 288. 2. Some who knew Szeftel would disagree with this characterization. Vera S. Dunham, who was a good friend of Szeftel's before the war, when both studied under Alexander Eck in Brussels, describes the young Szeftel as both "imaginative" and "creative" (letter to the author, August 22, 1993). 3. Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 19401971 , ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper, 1979), p. 214. 4. Peter Kahn, letter to the author, August 16, 1993. 5. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, pp. 36, 39. 6. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 106. 7. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 15. All subsequent citations are to this edition and will be incorporated into the text. 8. Strong Opinions, p. ix. 9. Although in later years he envied Nabokov his health, Szeftel outlived him. When he died in 1985, Szeftel had lived five years longer than had Nabokov. 10. Marc Szeftel to Vladimir Nabokov, letters, July 2, 1963. In Marc Szeftel Archive , Suzzallo and Allen Libraries, University of Washington (from now on identified as "SzA"). 11. My Poor Pnin was the original working title for the novel. 12. In SzA, letters, July 16, 1963. 13. In Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989), Gennadi Barabtarlo, for example, spoke rather harshly of Andrew Field's very brief attempt to link Szeftel and Pnin (see VN, pp. 291-93), complaining that it was "[tlhe 147 NOTES usual sort ofthing: let but a man have plausibility, a knot, and a point ofcontact with the author, and he risks being drafted. These ... conjectures, even if convincing, do not engage me in the least" (p. 44). 14. Some critics, among them Andre Mazon, John L. Fennell, and A. A. Zimin, have believed that the epic is a much later work and thus a "fake." Like Roman Jakobson, with whom he collaborated on several studies of the epic, Szeftel never doubted the work's authenticity and for many years fiercely argued with the "detractors ." The general consensus on the epic is summed up by Dean S. Worth: "Attacks on the autlienticity of [The Lay] have always come from amateurs, while its defenders have been philologists with professional competence in 12th-century Russian language and culture" (in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], p. 425). 15. Szeftel's widow, Kitty Szeftel, concurs in this opinion: "He took the idea of Marc as an immigrant professor having a hard time getting jobs and so forth ... and then he really made up his own character" (personal interview, November 13, 1992). To a certain degree, this experience of a Russian emigre finding it hard to penetrate the American academe was, also, ofcourse, shared by Nabokov himself. For more on that, see chapter 3 of the present study. 16. In Boyd, American Years, p. 289. In addition to making Nabokov laugh by imitating Szeftel's way ofspeaking, Appel also appears to have tried to reproduce Szeftel's English in the fictional Pnin's letter which he published in 1970 when guest-editing the TriQuarterly issue devoted to Nabokov and occasioned by Nabokov's seventieth birthday (reprinted in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970], pp. 366-71). In the early years of his life in the United States, Szeftel, who had spent more than fifteen years prior to the war in Belgium, spoke English with a very strong accent that was, apparently, part Russian and part French. This was exactly the effect that Appel was trying to re-create when, in Pnin's letter, he used both heavy Russianisms and French spellings. Kitty Szeftel and Szeftel's son, Marc Watson, who have read Appel's piece, strongly deny that Marc Szeftel's English was ever as bad...

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