Pnin is a portrait of a Russian émigré who teaches Russian at an American university. His ex-wife has a son, Victor, who, as a boy, shows remarkable talent as a draughtsman. Victor's instructor, Lake, ‘a recognized art expert’, has a profound knowledge of innumerable techniques, which he transmits to his pupil.1 Victor learns the theory of colours and is made aware of their shades, up to the point where they transcend ‘human perception’. He studies the blown up reflections of convex mirrors, the mediums and techniques of old masters and the transfigurations of objects seen through a glass of water. Of course, the mastery of these and other crafts does not make an artist; despite his skills and his having ‘the morose temper of genius’, Lake is not considered an accomplished artist as he ‘lacked originality’.

The relative importance of arts and craft, of representation versus imagination, is the subject of an everlasting dispute. With respect to the plastic arts, the emphasis nowadays on originality and invention is so strong that skills are hardly considered complementary. Nabokov, of course, rejected this sort of art: ‘art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles’ (SO 115). A lack of originality, as in Lake's case, is just as serious. In Modern Painters, Ruskin discusses the polemic papers by Joshua Reynolds which were published in 1759 in the Idler. According to Reynolds, painting consisting only of imitation, cannot, whatever its degree of truthfulness and excellency, be considered ‘as a liberal art’ because it has no ‘power over the imagination’. The distinction between imitation and imagination in painting is illustrated by Reynolds with the Dutch and Italian School. ‘The Italian attends only to the invariable, the great and general ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal Nature; the Dutch, on the contrary, to literal truth, and a minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of Nature modified by accident. The attention to these petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much admired in the Dutch pictures, which, if we suppose it to be a beauty, is certainly of a lower order, which ought to give place to a beauty of a superior kind, since one cannot be obtained but by departing from the other’.