Rooms of a professor
Professor Timofey Pnin has changed his way through a lot of lodgings during his life in America. An image of one of them is vividly depicted: “a room uptown New York, midway between Tsentral Park and Reeverside, on a block memorable for the waste-paper along the curb, the bright pat of dog dirt somebody had already slipped upon, and a tireless boy pitching a ball against the steps of the high brown porch”. The downcast appearance of the place he had to live in shows how difficult it was for him to achieve better place, and his efforts were not wasted.
Memories
Pnin has undertaken a trip from Waindell to Onkwedo, and at a gas station when he got out of his car he saw nature around him in its full power: “An inscrutable white sky hung over a clover field, and from a pile of firewood near a shack came a rooster's cry, jagged and gaudy--a vocal coxcomb”. The image of this has reminded him when he, yet a student of Petrograd University, had arrived at the small station of a Baltic summer resort. As Pnin notices himself, two images of past and present coincide in “the sounds, and the smells, and the sadness”.
Natural phenomena
During one of the walks with professor Chateau in the country, Pnin has observed a ver beautiful picture: “A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin's shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snow-flakes before settling again.” The image of butterflies, along with a simple purpose of giving pleasure to an eye, has also a certain subtext: Chateau’s chatterings have disturbed Pnin’s memories like Pnin’s rubber has disturbed a net of butterflies.
