PHANTOM OF FACT: VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S 'PNIN' ANNOTATED (FICTION, COMMENTARY)

The work is a comprehensive analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, a novel published in 1957. The dissertation consists of three parts. The introductory section provides information on the history of the text and discusses various artistic problems and cruxes of the novel, such as chronology, cast, compositional devices, thematic interaction, transitions and so forth.; The second (and largest) part comprises the page by page commentary involving interpretation of the text and factual exegesis. A special care has been taken to supply, wherever possible, illustrative parallel texts from other works by Nabokov, particularly the chronologically adjacent ones (Lolita, Pale Fire, Bend Sinister, and Nabokov's notes to Eugene Onegin). Similar techniques, tropes, and recurrent situations are collated and discussed in this part of the thesis. On the other hand, biographical correlations have been used sparingly and treated with extreme caution, to protect the ambience of commentary from extraneous light of the superficial "human element". The discussion of the first person Narrator figures prominently in the notes, as does the persistent analysis of recurrent themes and patterns as well as their interlacements within the limited space of a chapter or the larger structure of the novel. An attempt has been made to bring up all literary associations and clues that could be detected. All variants and discrepancies found in the New Yorker version are supplied at appropriate places.; The last part includes a series of appendices (a complete list of the book's 304 characters, chronology chart, flora and fauna, Pnin's spectrum, etc.), and a detailed bibliography.