Pnin

Summary (from the publisher): One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.

Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.

Review: Timofey Pnin, the eponymous character of Nabokov's novel, is by far the most endearing and most unintentionally hilarious Nabokov character of all his works I have read so far. Pnin is a socially awkward, fumbling Russian who is struggling to remain employed with an American college in the 1950s.

Pnin is one of those unfortunate souls with the best intentions for whom nothing seems to go right. In fact, in the very beginning of the book, Pnin is traveling by train to give a lecture. He is described as "spindly," "sloppy," and "frail-looking" - in short a rather awkward, albeit well-meaning middle-aged man (7). Shortly, the reader learns that poor Pnin is "on the wrong train. He was unaware of it. [...] As a matter of fact, Pnin at the moment felt very well satisfied with himself" (8). In this way the book continues, in a series of both comical and tragic misadventures.

Despite Pnin's ineptitude, I couldn't help but love him. Pnin teaches a dwindling number of students semi-successfully. He moves from one rented room the next, always having to leave for one reason or another, most of them "sonic." He gets lost driving his ancient car - "to a less sympathetic soul than our imagined observer, that this pale blue, egg-shaped two-door sedan, of uncertain age and in mediocre condition, was manned by an idiot. Actually its driver was Professor Timofey Pnin" (112). His accent leads to hilarious mispronunciations (such as "John" instead of "Joan"). The reader learns his wife has left him for another man, but dear old Pnin has a relationship with his wife's child, Victor, even though the boy is not his son. Of course, when he goes to pick up the boy at the train station, he mistakenly identifies another boy as Victor; "bending in amiable interrogatory welcome over the thin-necked little boy, who, however, kept shaking his head and pointing to his mother" (103). The cheerful way with which Pnin picks himself up after each and every social blunder engendered a great fondness in me for Pnin.

In fact, it's quite to the credit of Nabokov's skill of a writer that one of the main crisis points of the novel is when Pnin drops his beloved glass bowl (a gift from Victor) in the sink. As a reader, I was aghast and broken-hearted for yet another sad defeat for Pnin; he's so pitiful, I could only hope for one thing to go right for the poor fellow. "He almost caught it - his fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge. [...] He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink" (172).

Of course, it's hard to say what the reader really knows about Pnin, since the narrator is intentionally unreliable throughout. Early in the novel, he claims to be Pnin's doctor, saying, "For the nonce I am his physician" (20). But in the conclusion of the book, he claims to have been treated by Pnin's father, who was a physician himself. "In the afternoon I was taken to a leading ophthalmologist, Dr. Pavel Pnin" (175). Of course, the narrator also claims to be a professor at Waindell, where Pnin teaches. Interestingly, (according to the narrator at least), Pnin denies all of this history with the narrator - "he denied everything. He said he vaguely recalled my grandaunt but had never met me" (180). And later, "Pnin cried to Dr. Barakan across the table: 'Now, don't believe a word he says, Georgiy Aramovick. He makes up everything. He once invented that we were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations. He is a dreadful inventor" (185). Or perhaps it's Pnin's memory that is faulty? We'll never know.

Review: 4