In V.Nabokov's Pnin, his occasional landlord, Prof. Laurence Clements, is a specialist on the philosophy of gesture. Once he recorded on film Pnin's demonstrations of Russian "carpalistics" to illustrate his brand of Behaviorism. Nevertheless, gestures in Nabokov have an indestructible link with the verbal domain. They are not only coded signals. Although their shape and motion is verbally rendered, or echoed by stylistic devices, they demand an additional "trifle" together with the diagrams and maps.

As it happens in his lecture on Charles Dickens (Lectures on Literature, Bowers, p.124), after quoting the author's description of a London cab-driver ("The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontenously in the western streets of London...receives his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches over-handed, and retires"), Nabokov adds: "This gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet 'over-handed' - a trifle- but the man is alive forever in a good reader's mind...A great writer's world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character like the person who tosses the twopence, has the right to live and breed."

Still hoping to read more about Nabokov's kinaesthetic imaging from S.E.Sweeney's article, recently presented at the "Nabokov Upside Down" conference, I found out more about one of our EDs's publications on a related theme. Namely "Nabokov's Amphiphorical Gestures" [ S.E. Sweeney www.librarything.com/work/1775022Em ], but I couldn't ascertain when it was released.