Liza Bogolepov, a medical student just turned twenty, and perfectly charming in her black silk jumper and tailor-made skirt, was already working at the Meudon sanatorium directed by that remarkable and formidable old lady, Dr Rosetta Stone, one of the most destructive psychiatrists of the day; and, moreover, Liza wrote verse – mainly in halting anapaest; indeed, Pnin saw her for the first time at one of those literary soirées where young émigré poets, who had left Russia in their pale, unpampered pubescence, chanted nostalgic elegies dedicated to a country that could be little more to them than a sad stylized toy, a bauble found in the attic, a crystal globe which you shake to make a soft luminous snowstorm inside over a minuscule fir tree and a log cabin of papermâché. Pnin wrote her a tremendous love letter – now safe in a private collection – and she read it with tears of self-pity while recovering from a pharmacopoeial attempt at suicide because of a rather silly affair with a littérateur  who is now – But no matter. Five analysts, intimate friends of hers, all said: ‘Pnin – and a baby at once.’