![]() ![]() 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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