Pnin

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For the Russian poet, see Ivan Pnin.

Bookcover of an early edition.

Pnin is the fourth novel written in English by Vladimir Nabokov; it was published in 1957.

[edit] Plot summary

The book follows a Russian-born professor named Timofey Pavlovich Pnin living in the United States.

Pnin came to the United States from St. Petersburg in 1940 and has become a professor of Russian at Waindell College. At Waindell he settled down to an academic life. In the course of several chapters we learn about his various mishaps, misfortunes, his difficulties to adjust to the American language and life as an outsider, and his continuing problems with his ex-wife, also a Russian émigré. Eventually there is a plot to oust him from his academic position, and even the narrator gets involved. Pnin endures these tribulations with equanimity.

[edit] Comments

Pnin was published in installments in The New Yorker in order to generate income while Nabokov was scouring the United States for a publisher willing to publish Lolita. On the surface, the resulting "novel" deals with the profound and nightmarish displacements of 20th Century history with supremely civilized humor and tolerance. Upon closer reading, Pnin reveals itself to be an early Nabokovian meditation on time, memory, and the complexities of narrative. The book's narrator, who bears many similarities to Nabokov—a landed-gentry Russian émigré past—gradually reveals himself as a less than disinterested observer. By the final chapter, he has completely taken over and becomes the central character. Pnin is only glimpsed fleeing the scene that the narrator has appropriated.

In several earlier scenes, Pnin called the veracity of the narrator into question, and oddly, for an almost uniformly benevolent character, seems to bear malice towards him. As presented by the narrator, those outbursts seem to be no more than evidence of Pnin's quirky nature. But the final words of the book open up delirious new possibilities; they are the spoken words of yet another Pnin "observer" and they disconcertingly leave the reader with an entirely different, and crueller version of perhaps Nabokov's conclusion to the events of Chapter One. We remember that the narrator, back in Chapter One, was disappointed by the prosaically benign conclusion of those events, claiming to hate happy endings. Now a new narrator seems to have provided him with a more satisfactorily unhappy conclusion to those events. But as we only have Nabokov's by-now highly suspect testimony to vouch for the words of the new narrator, we are left to wonder if the new happily-unhappy version was ever spoken, or if Nabokov is simply editing an earlier text of his own devising with which he has grown increasingly dissatisfied. The possibility presents itself that Pnin, vanished from the University without a forwarding address and replaced by Nabokov, is no more than the novelist narrator's invention — a character for a novel. However, Pnin materializes out of the void into which he has disappeared—not in this text, but in Nabokov's later novel Pale Fire (1963).

[edit] Background

The novel draws from Nabokov's experience at American academic institutions, primarily Cornell, and it has been claimed that it is "teeming" with people from that university.^[1] The main character may in some aspects resemble Professor Marc Szeftel, who was aware of this but did not take any particular offense, while the narrator discloses events from his own past as well as from Pnin's past that correlate to Nabokov's upbringing.^[1]

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} Field, Andrew. VN, The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York (1977), ISNB 0-517-65113-1.