1. I have this completely cockamamie theory about Nabokov which no one is going to buy but this is twitter, so I'll put it forward.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
2. There's a scene in Pnin where the title character is feeding nuts to squirrels on a park bench and has an intimation of his mortality.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
3. To my mind that scene in Pnin always echoed similar scene in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita
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Replying to @HeerJeet
4. Here's the thing: while writing Pnin in early 1950s, Nabokov couldn't possibly have read Master & Margarita
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Replying to @HeerJeet
5. Master and Margarita written between 1928 and 1940, first published in 1967. Existed before Pnin but not available to Nabokov.
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Replying to @carlzoilus
@carlzoilus Not 100% sure but I'm pretty confident that M&M wasn't available anywhere before 1967.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
@HeerJeet@carlzoilus widely reproduced Telegraph blurb says "circulated in samizdat form for decades"2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @mvsyyz
@mvsyyz@carlzoilus Would be great to know more about how familiar VN was with samizdat literature.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
@carlzoilus @mvsyyz He was very wary of official Soviet culture and even of some dissenting writers like Pasternak but he must have read.
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