Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (review)

250 Nabokov Studies Galya Diment. Pniniad: Vladimir Nabo^ and Marc Szeftel. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997. Review by Gerard de Vries. When Pnin, after seeing his former wife off to the Waindell bus station, walks back through the park he is seized by his yearning for her: "to hold her, to keep her—just as she was," and then he sums up her numerous shortcomings. His next thought is how detestable it would be to become reunited with her in Heaven. And while we see him sobbing about his loneliness we also find him gloating over me prospect of living all by himself as a recluse. "At the end of die novel," says Gennadi Barabtarlo of Pnin, "his face becomes vaporous, his character little known" (Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin, [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989], 34). Contrasting the complexity of his character is the obviousness of the foibles which dominate his daüy life. This is because Pnin is too old an emigrant from Russia to acquire a fair understanding of the American way of life and a proper command of its language, and even too old to regret this imperfect affiliation as all that is dear to him belongs to a different country. Pnin shared this maladjustment with other exiles from Russia in such a way that Nabokov experienced tiiat "every Russian in America who teaches anything Russian recognizes himself in Pnin" (quoted by Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years [London: Chatte & Windus, 1992], 289.) Among them one has been singled out as die most likely candidate, Marc Szeftel, a colleague of Nabokov's at Cornell. Galya Diment has set herself the task to investigate the grounds for this allegation and in addition to review Szeftel's and Nabokov's relationship. They have got to know each other quite well. Their first meeting was in 1947 when Nabokov was interviewed by the hiring committee (to replace Ernest Simmons) of which Szeftel was a member. During the twelve years they spent at Cornell, it became clear that Nabokov felt little affinity for his colleague, who, as far as he Reviews 251 was concerned, would have embraced much more closeness. Before entering this subject, Diment describes Szeftel's life before he came to the USA in 1942. Being born into a Jewish family in Russia, he escaped die pogroms of that time by moving to Poland, while Hitler's occupation of Europe drove him, like the Nabokovs, to the USA. It is clear from his diary (see the entry of September, 9, 1976; 92) that his life up to that point had been far from happy. This in contrast with Pnin's life whose youth is a hoard of cherished memories, of his parents, their friends, his schoolmates, his girlfriend and the Russian landscapes he used to know. In the second chapter the pre-Pninian period at Cornell is described. Szeftel and Nabokov join Roman Jakobson's project to edit an English translation of The Lay of Igor's Campaign with a historical and literary commentary, but this never materialized. In the next chapter, on Pnin, Diment develops an interesting theory. This is based on die famüiar notion that, during the novel, Pnin matures from a mere stooge into a selfgoverning individual, who is able to disentangle himself from his creator. Diment points out that this change corresponds with the alterations which took place in Nabokov's characterization of Pnin and witii the amendments he made in the text, which "revisions have the effect of bringing Pnin much nearer to Marc Szeftel" (46). She argues that it is "largely through Marc Szeftel that Pnin eventually gained . . . more independence" from his creator, and that "the 'humanized' Pnin is, in many ways, the 'Szeftelized' Pnin" (51). The changes she mentions are striking enough, and it also appears that in 1954, just between the years 1953 and 1955 (the years these changes apply to), Nabokov gave Szeftel a copy of his translation of The Lay of Igor's Campaign (39). This was a remarkable fact of benevolence since in 1948 Nabokov had refused to lend him the manuscript of The Magician (142), and neither did he...