![]() 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. 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. Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Nabokov's novel is imbued with that deep sense of love for individuals, even down to the most humiliated and pathetic ones. This is a story of life and self-assertion - the problems and failures that we so often encounter. 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. Pnin is a Russian who stayed unable to become American. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950's. One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. ![]()
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