#victor wind

[hermitthrush]

But the results were either monstrous or nil: the seven-year-old subject scored on the so-called Godunov Drawing-of-an-Animal Test a sensational mental age of seventeen, but on being given a Fairview Adult Test promptly sank to the mentality of a two-year-old. How much care, skill, and inventiveness have gone to devise those marvelous techniques! What a shame that certain patients refuse to co-operate!

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) | Chapter 4.3. Victor Wind, prodigy and crack in his Freudian parents’ psychoanalytic molds. Nabokov concocts a whole bevy of authoritative-sounding tests in this scene. Also, I very much had disinterested non-verbal or autism spectrum clients that didn’t give a shit about similar tests and thus were scored “mentally deficient” for decades.  Some to their own use, by pretending the couldn’t do more for themselves to cajole staff into doing stuff for them (changing the record over, putting on their shirt, etc.)

[hermitthrush]

He dreamed of mellowing his pigments at the Old Masters had done - with honey, fig juice, poppy oil, and the slime of pink snails. He loved water colors and he loved oils, but was wary of the too fragile pastel and the too coarse distemper. He studied his mediums with the care and patience of an insatiable child - one of those painter's apprentices (it is now Lake who is dreaming!), lads with bobbed hair and bright eyes who would spend years grinding colors in the workshop of some great Italian skiagrapher, in a world of amber and paradisal glazes. At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. At nine, he had known the sensuous delight of a graded wash. What did it matter to him that gentle chiaroscuro, offspring of veiled values and translucent undertones, had long since died behind the prison bars of abstract art, in the poorhouse of hideous primitivism?

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) | Chapter 4.5. Victor’s prodigious artistic talent an anachronism or atavism in the world of modern art.  Critics would consider the poetry of Pale Fire in this same light, to Nabokov’s discredit.