The elderly traveler, sitting in the fast-moving train's seat near the north window, facing two empty seats, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin.He was handsomely bald, tanned, and clean-shaven, and the first thing that stood out was his large brown head and tortoiseshell spectacles (covering the eyebrows that were beginning to fall out) , the thick ape-like upper lip, the thick neck and the strong bones of the body in the tight tweed jacket; but it was his (now wearing flannel trousers, crossed but the legs are quite thin, and the feet are extremely slender, almost exactly like women's feet.

His scruffy wool socks were scarlet with lavender argyle patterns; his old-fashioned black pumps cost him nearly as much as he spent on all his attire, including his gaudy tie. Inner) generally more money in other areas.Before the 1940s, during his stable life in Europe, he always liked to wear long underpants, the bottoms of which were tucked into clean silk stockings of plain color and embroidered on the side, and hung on the calf of cotton trousers with garters.At that time, it was as vulgar for Pnin to raise the trouser legs too high to show the white drawers underneath, as to let the ladies see him without a collar and tie; In that squalid apartment in the 16th arrondissement—where Pnin lived for fifteen years after escaping Leninized Russia and finishing his higher education in Prague—if the old woman Lu, the doorkeeper, came upstairs Came to collect the rent, and it happened that the prim Pnin was not wearing a fauxcol, and he would immediately cover the collar button on the front of his neck with an elegant hand.All this has changed somewhat in the casual atmosphere of this new world.Now, at the age of fifty-two, he is more interested in sunbathing. He wears short-sleeved shirts and baggy trousers.Now he might do the same to a fellow traveler, but there was no one else in the carriage except Pnin, who was sleeping soundly at one end, and two ladies at the other, who were attentive to a baby.

Here is a secret to reveal, that is, Professor Pnin took the wrong car.He did not know it himself, nor did the conductor, who had by this time passed through several carriages to the one in which Pnin was traveling.To tell the truth, Pnin felt elated at the moment.Miss Judith Clyde, Deputy Director of the Ladies' Club of Cremona, asked him to come to Cremona on Friday evening—a town about two hundred versts west of Wendale, where Pnin lived and taught since 1945— Giving an academic report, she told our friend that it is most suitable to take the train that leaves Wendale at 1:52 in the afternoon and arrives in Cremona at 4:17.But Pnin, like many Russians, was too fond of time-tables, maps, catalogs, and the like, kept them as close as possible, and then, with the excitement of idleness, made use of them as he pleased, once he had figured it out for himself. Some schedules get complacent.After some research he found a more convenient train (leaving Wendale at 2:19 p.m., arriving in Cremona at 4:32 p.m.), with an inconspicuous reference sign beside it, Marked every Friday, and only Friday, this 2:19 train departs for a relatively large city in the distance that also bears a pleasant Italian name, with a stop in Cremona on the way.Unfortunately for Pnin, however, his train timetable was printed five years ago, and parts of it are no longer valid.

He taught Russian at Wendell College, which is a more or less local school, characterized by an artificial lake in the middle of the beautiful campus, and ivy-covered corridors connecting the various buildings. The murals show some of the school's recognized teachers passing the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare and Pasteur to a host of big, fat farm boys and girls.In addition, there is an active and large German department, which the head of the department, Dr. Hagen, proudly calls "a school within a school" (pronouncing every syllable very clearly). In the fall semester of 1950, among the few students enrolled in Russian, there was a transition class, the blunt and earnest Betty Bliss, a first-named senior (who took credit and never Ivan Debord, who attended the class), and three other spirited juniors: Josephine Malgan, whose grandparents were born in Minsk; Charles Macbeth, with a prodigious memory, Already dealing with ten languages, ready to bury ten more; listless Eileen Lang, who was told that once she mastered the Russian alphabet she could almost read Anna Karamazov in the original.As a faculty member, Pnin could not compete with those wonderful Russian ladies scattered throughout American academia, who, despite little formal education, somehow relied on instinct, glibness, and a kind of maternal instinct. Vitality, in the atmosphere of the ballads of the Volga Mother River, red caviar and samovar, they instilled the mysterious knowledge of their difficult and beautiful language to a group of ignorant students one by one; as a teacher, Puning, I never imagined that I would enter the lofty palace of modern scientific linguistics—the ascetic-like academic world of phoneme research. What some serious young men learned in that palace was not the language itself, but just learned a set of methods and taught others to use them as well. This method of teaching is nothing more; this method of cascading water from one rock to another is no longer a reasonable guiding medium, but may in the unimaginable future help to develop the esoteric The vernacular of the country—basic Basque or something—only certain sophisticated machines could speak.Pnin undoubtedly adopted a careless and idle attitude towards the job, and indeed he taught only from a grammar book edited by the head of the Slavic department at a much larger institution than Wendell College, the head of which was a young German A swindler whose Russian is so bad it's a joke, yet who has the magnanimity to let the products of other people's hard work anonymously be published under his name.Pnin, for all his faults, possessed a reassuring, old-fashioned charm which his faithful protege, Dr. Hagen, asserted to some surly trustees as an exquisite import, Worth paying in local cash.Pnin's Ph.D. in sociology and political economy, which he received at the University of Prague around 1925, had become useless by the middle of the century, but he was not entirely incompetent as a teacher of the Russian language.He was likable not because of any major talent but because of his haunting gags, taking off his glasses whenever he got off topic, massaging his realistic face while beaming with reminiscence. lens.Nostalgic talk in broken English, autobiographical anecdotes, how Pnin came to Soedinyonnie Shtati (United States). “Customs on board before disembarkation, OK! ‘Is there anything to declare?’ ‘No.’ OK! And then some political questions. He asked, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ and I said,’” —the presenter paused for a moment for a moment of secret glee in his heart—"'First of all, what are we to understand by "anarchism"? Practical, metaphysical, theoretical, Is it mystical, is it abstract, is it personal, is it social anarchism? When I was young,' I said, 'it all meant a lot to me.' So we had a very interesting Discussion, and I ended up spending two full weeks at Ellis Island.”—the stomach began to rise and fall, and the speaker burst into laughter.

And there are some even better occasions for humor.The kind-hearted Pnin, with a shy and mysterious expression, was about to tell the children some interesting things he had experienced in the past, and at the same time, he couldn't help but show his broken and terrible yellow teeth, and then he would open a dilapidated book Russian book, turned to the place where he had carefully sandwiched a delicate artificial leather bookmark; when he opened the book, there would often be a look of panic on his face, which completely changed his meek face; Gagging, flicking the book feverishly back and forth, it may take several minutes to find the page you need - or the satisfaction that you've marked the right place after all.Most of the passages he chooses are taken from some old and childish comedy about the habits of the merchants that Ostrovsky scribbled almost a century ago, or from an equally old, or even older, play that triumphs by twisting the meaning of words. The farce of Leskov of little value.He reads these antiquities in the sonorous and enthusiastic voice of the Alexandria Classical Theater (a theater in Petersburg) rather than in the crisp, simple voice of the Moscow Artists Theater; Not only must he be fully familiar with the dialect and dialect, but he must also have a wealth of literary knowledge, neither of which are possessed by the students in his poor small class, so the showman is left alone to appreciate the subtle associations in the text.That heaving pant of which we have just mentioned will now turn into a veritable earthquake.While Pnin imitated the performance as if on a brightly lit stage, he tried to recall a period of passionate and sensitive youth (in a brilliant world that seemed to be all the more vivid though it was eliminated by history), As he cites example after example, he becomes so deeply narcissistic that his audience politely assumes that the stuff must be Russian humor.After a while the jokes were too much for him, and pear-shaped tears rolled down his swarthy cheeks.Not only the terrifying row of teeth, but also a large pink upper gum, suddenly popped out, like a doll box is opened and the doll pops out.His hand would jerk to his mouth, and his broad shoulders would sway from side to side.Although his waving hand muffled the words and made them all the more incomprehensible to the class, his energy to lose himself completely in his own gaiety proved irresistible.When the time came when he could no longer control his emotions, he would cause the students to burst into uncontrollable laughter, a sudden, rhythmic burst of maniac laughter from Charles, a series of unexpected, beautiful, passionate laughs. The sound made Josephine change her appearance. She was not beautiful, but the beautiful Irene giggled impolitely.

All this did not change the fact that Pnin took the wrong bus. How should we diagnose his sad case?In particular, it should be emphasized that Pnin is not at all the good-tempered German pedantic der zerstreute Professor of the last century.On the contrary, he may be overly cautious, too persistently on the lookout for evil traps, too preoccupied with his vigilance, lest the grotesque surroundings (unpredictable America) should lure him into something absurd.The world was in a trance, and it was Pnin's responsibility to straighten it out.All his life he had been engaged with ruthless subjects who, as soon as they entered his domain, either fell apart, or attacked him, or were ineffective, or dazed and bewildered.His hands are terribly clumsy, yet he can make a one-note whistle out of a pod in the blink of an eye, make ten jumps on a pond with a flat stone, With the black shadow of a rabbit on the wall (also done in the blink of an eye), and other mundane tricks that the Russians conjure things out of their sleeves, he thought he had a great set. craft.He doted on gadgets with a sort of bewildered and superstitious delight.Various electrical devices fascinated him.The plastic stuff thrilled him.He also raved about the zipper.But when a storm crippled the local power station in the middle of the night, his dutiful electric clock would tell him the wrong time in the morning.The frames of his glasses would snap off in the middle, leaving him with two lenses, and he would vaguely try to join them, perhaps hoping for a miracle of self-organic bonding to fix it.The zipper on which a gentleman relies so heavily will come loose with a flick of his hand somehow, in one of his nightmare moments of haste and desperation.

He still didn't know he was in the wrong car. For Pnin, English was a particular danger zone.When he left France and came to America, he knew bits and pieces of words that were of little use, such as "there is nothing but silence," "never again," "weekend," "who's who?" Common words like 'eat', 'street', 'fountain pen', 'thug', 'Charleston', 'marginal utility', and so on, had no knowledge of English at all.So he sat down and doggedly learned the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Edison, and thirty-one American presidents.In 1941, after a year of study, he was able to use such glib words as "wishful thinking" and "good luck".By 1942 he was able to insert the phrase "to make a long story short" in his speech.During Truman's second term as president, Pnin could talk on almost any topic; but then, despite his best efforts, his progress seemed to stagnate, and by 1950 his English was still full of flaws.In addition to teaching Russian that fall, he gave weekly lectures at a so-called symposium ("Slowly Changing Europe: An Introduction to Contemporary Continental Culture") under Dr. Hagen's supervision.All the speeches of our friend, including the miscellaneous reports he gave in other places, were edited by a young teacher of the German Department.The whole process is quite complicated.Professor Pnin first laboriously translated his fluent Russian manuscript full of aphorisms into an English manuscript full of flaws, and then asked the young Miller to make some revisions, and then Hagen's female secretary, Miss Eisenbauer, typed it out with a typewriter. .Pnin then deleted passages that he didn't quite understand, and finally read it as it was written, and read it to his weekly audience.Without a pre-prepared script, he can't do anything about it; and he doesn't hide his shortcomings by the old trick of moving his eyes up and down, which is to glance at the script quickly, memorize a series of sentences, and talk at length. Listen to the audience, then drag out the ending, and then immediately glance at the following sentence.Puning's flustered eyes would definitely read the wrong line.So he preferred to read his lectures in a baritone voice, his eyes fixed on it, in a slow, monotonous tone, as if slowly climbing those endless stairs for those who are afraid of elevators.

The conductor, a grey-haired, kindly old man, with a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles set low on his crumpled but functional nose, and with a grimy sticking plaster stuck to his thumb, had all he had left. Three carriages need to check tickets, and then come to the last carriage that Puning took. At this moment, Pnin fell into a special Pnin-like uneasy mood.He was in a Pninian predicament.Whenever he went to spend the night in a strange town, he took with him the requisites such as shoe lasts, apples, a dictionary, and his Gladstone duffel bag, which contained a relatively new set of The black dress he was planning to wear that evening to the ladies of Cremona ("Are the Russians Communists?").It also contained a copy of the speech ("Don Quixote and Faust") at the symposium next Monday ("Don Quixote and Faust"), and he planned to read it again tomorrow on the way back to Wendale. A paper written by Bliss ("Dostoevsky and Gestalt Psychology"), which he had to review on behalf of her chief spiritual advisor, Dr. Hagen.His embarrassment was this: if he put the manuscript he was going to speak in Cremona—a neatly folded stack of typed paper—in his pocket, it would be more secure against his warm body, But according to the reasoning, he probably forgot to take it out of the jacket he was wearing now and put it in the jacket he was going to wear in the evening.Besides, if he put this speech in the pocket of the suit in his travel bag now, he knew he would have to worry about the suitcase being stolen again.In the third aspect (this state of mind always breeds additional complications), in the inside pocket of the coat he is currently wearing is a valuable wallet containing two ten-dollar bills, one of which I paid in 194 The clippings of a letter he wrote to The New York Times concerning the Yalta Conference for five years, as well as his naturalization certificate; Brought out and unfortunately lost.Our friend had already opened his traveling bag twice during the twenty minutes on the train, and rummaged through several of his manuscripts.When the conductor came to this carriage, the industrious Pnin was laboriously reviewing Betty's work, which began with the opening sentence: "When we consider the current of thought in which we all live, we have to pay attention to—"

The conductor came in, didn't wake the soldier, promised the two ladies he'd let them get off when they arrived, and shook his head at Pnin's ticket.The stop in Cremona was withdrawn two years ago. "An important speech!" cried Pnin. "What to do? It's a catastrophe!" The grey-haired train conductor sat down on the seat opposite Pnin with a serious expression but comfortably, looking up a timetable full of wrinkled corners in silence.In a few minutes, that is to say, at 3:08, Pnin had to get off at Whitchurch, which would enable him to catch the four o'clock bus which would take him to Clark around six o'clock. Ramona.

"I thought I could save twelve minutes, but now I have lost almost two full hours," said Pnin bitterly.He cleared his throat, ignored the kind grey-haired old man's reassuring words ("You'll make it."), and hastily removed his reading glasses and packed his rock-heavy travel bag , into the corridor at the end of the car, so as to wait there for the indistinguishable green scenery outside the car to pass by, and the station he remembered in his mind came before him.