Word: timofey
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Vladimir, acquaintances remember, was handsome, courtly, occasionally terribly amusing at parties. It was not for Nabokov, though, to commit the hilarious gaffes of his comic creation, the emigre Professor Timofey Pnin. Years of having to conform with dignity as an outsider had marked his manner. Mrs. Yvor Winters, widow of the critic, recalls that Nabokov would never kiss a woman's hand, as many other refugees did. "If I were in Russia," he once confided to her, "I would kiss your hand...
...Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather...
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