The Potter and His Mark: Reading Conclusive Evidence and Pnin Archivally

Abstract: Are there similarities between the structural and thematic patterns that dominate Conclusive Evidence and Pnin ? What do the authorial mock review of the autobiography—unpublished during Nabokov’s lifetime and now known as “Chapter Sixteen”—and the seven draft notes on index cards hidden among Nabokov’s papers at the Library of Congress expose about the autobiography’s overlapping images of pottery and bridges, puzzles and chess, rainbows and sea pebbles? How does Nabokov’s in-depth research on the early history of ceramic production illuminate the convergence of the themes of loss and art’s permanence and redemptive power in Conclusive Evidence ? Finally, can an early version of the autobiography’s title, “The Potter’s Mark,” coupled with Nabokov’s preparatory study of pigments, be used to explain Victor Wind’s relationship with his mother and Professor Lake in Chapter Four of Pnin ? This paper explores complex motifs that tie the autobiography’s thematic thread of loss to a central idea in Nabokov’s postwar work: if life produces loss, then art’s purpose is to thwart its destructiveness by creating a unique, permanent version of the broken vessel.