6/1/2023 0 Comments Vera mrs vladimir nabokovThat Pnin still hopelessly loves Liza, despite all her cruelty and selfishness, is clear from this. She had a sweep of dark brown hair above a lustrous forehead, and a snow-and-rose complexion, and she used a very light red lipstick, and save for a certain thickness of ankle and wrist, there was hardly a flaw to her full-blown, animated, elemental, not particularly well-groomed beauty. Actually her eyes were of a light transparent blue with contrasting black lashes and bright pink canthus, and they slightly stretched up templeward, where a set of feline little lines fanned out from each. Whatever eyes Liza Pnin, now Wind, had, they seemed to reveal their essence, their precious-stone water, only when you evoked them in thought, and then a blank, blind, moist, aquamarine blaze shivered and stared as if a spatter of sun and sea had got between your own eyelids. There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark. Here is a fairly typical example of his manner, as he introduces Pnin’s ex-wife, the heartless Liza: It is notoriously difficult to talk about the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin because he is both the novel’s omniscient author and a character in his own story, neither one of which is Nabokov himself in propria persona. “My Dear Eyes”: Nabokov’s Letters to Véra
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