James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And in fact, I think Nabokov did write these episodes out of order.
Uh I think he began with chapter two, in fact, um, and published uh two or three of them in the New Yorker as separate stories.
But we can think of them as sort of linked comic
Episodes.
The book begins with probably the f the most famous comic episode, which is that Professor Penin are
Russian emigre professor of Russian, um, grew up obviously in Russia, emigrated like Nabokov did to France, and like Nabokov has come to the United States.
Our professor Pennin is teaching Russian at uh a small college, what would be called in America a liberal arts college called Wayne Dell uh College.
This becomes a great source of comedy in the novel, since Wayne Dell, when pronounced
By Panin in his heavy Russian accent, can get very close to not only Vaindel but Vandal, Vandal College.
He's teaching at Waindale College, and as the novel opens, he's on the train to another college town to give a lecture.
Unfortunately, he's on the wrong train, and for at least some of the first chapter, it also looks as if he won't have his speech with.
Quite.
Tragically, or with a cometragic uh element that's quite characteristic of the book, which is that he has a sort of almost like a cardiac arrest, a sort of seizure uh in a park, and in that moment, um all his past comes back to him.
He sees his parents, he's bat is back in St.
Petersburg.
Um he's not in America anymore, he's unhoused.
And the book moves through similarly tragic comics.
Episodes.
In chapter two, he finds lodgings with the kind-hearted Clemences on on the campus.
He's visited by his ex-wife Lisa Wind and by Lisa's son, Victor, and both of those scenes are
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