Nabokov is commonly regarded merely as an aesthete; a writer who regarded art as a plaything, a wordsmith so obsessed with his verbosity that he disregarded any political, philosophical or human themes in his works, a writer who eschewed the idea that art had any purpose except to satisfy his own whims, a writer with a jejunish obsession with artifice and deception; “The most enchanting things in nature and art are based on deception.” (The Gift) Nabokov’s books are notoriously dense, full of unreliable narrators and elaborate games, yet the writer who once stated that he had no moral to teach, actually had a strong moral underpinning for each of his works of literature. It is not for nothing that Nabokov stated that great art is based on deception, as he was able to deceive readers into thinking him a mere aesthete, rather than as one of the most morally astute artists of the 20th century, who chose to hide his plain and simple morals behind a dazzling array of beautiful words and images, a writer whose works are resplendent with philosophy and exploration of the human condition. Of all Nabokov’s works, Pnin is amongst the strongest moral ones, one whose protagonist, despite being a kind, erudite and intelligent man, is constantly though of and treated as a bumbling idiot by those around him. Pnin acts as a kind of rejoinder to Don Quixote, a book which Nabokov had lectured on before writing Pnin, a book which invited the reader to delight in the miseries of another person.The novelists protagonist, Timofey Pnin, is introduced to us in comical fashion; “ideally bald, sun-tanned and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrow,) apish upper lip, thick neck and strong man torso in a tightish tweet coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs and frail looking, almost feminine feet.” Pnin is a composite of comic characteristics, whose appearance is both juvenile and simian, whose clothing is somewhat ridiculous, and whose body is a ridiculous mix of masculine and feminine features, a creature that is destined to be ridiculed. Yet, perhaps the last description is the most important and acts as a rejoinder against the narrators attempt to get the reader to ridicule Pnin; his elegant, feminine, perhaps even beautiful feet perhaps symbolise the elegant and sensitive soul behind the apish upper lip and brown do. Perhaps they are the only insight as to Pnin’s actual character.The narrator tells us that Pnin, on a way to a lecture he is about to deliver to the Cremona’s Women’s Club, is on the wrong train. Pnin, in order to save time decided to deviate from the normal train route to Cremona and upon consulting an old timetable, decides to catch an alternative route, unaware that this timetable is long obsolete. Pnin, it turns out, taught Russian at Waindell College, whereby he exists as a kind of eccentric crank, a figure of fun amongst asinine academics, teaching a course whose student numbers barely pass beyond single figures, whose broken English is a source of constant mirth amongst students and colleagues alike. “No doubt Pnin’s approach to his work was amateurish and light-hearted”, states the narrator, yet it seems that Pnin’s knowledge of Russian language, literature and history is anything but amateurish and his passionate digressions on Russian literature or history during classes are far from light-hearted, indeed they point to a deep and passionate love and understanding for the materials he teaches.Pnin, it seems is a character who is constantly misunderstood; note, for example, the description of his private reminisces to his students; “Directing his memory, with all the lights on and all the masks of the mind a-miming, towards the days of his fervid and receptive youth, Pnin would get drunk on his private wines as he produced sample after sample of what his listeners politely surmised as Russian humour. Presently the fun would become too much for him; pear shaped tears would trickle down his tanned cheeks…By the time he was helpless with it, he would have his students in stiches…” One wonders, however, whether Pnin’s recollections are as humorous as his ignorant audience (and by extension narrator) think they are, or whether they are the recollection of an old man of his long last past. We then hear about Pnin’s clumsiness with material object, his constant look out for potential banana skins in a world that is constantly trying to slip him up. Despite this perceived physical clumsiness, however, he had an inordinate skill in stone skipping and shadowgraphs, again it seems that if you delve beneath the surface, clumsy unattractive Pnin with the feminine feet, ridiculous Pnin with the broken English reminiscing about his exiled past (a matter which would have been of interest to any Slavophiles) or clumsy Pnin who could skip stones with aplomb, you will perhaps see depth to a character who by proxy is merely seen and treated as a figure of fun.A brief befuddlement over his lecture papers and his student’s essays (one of which is about Don Quixote) puts Pnin in a “Pninian quandary”, as he struggles to juggle his unique filing system for various other important pieces of paperwork, which he carries along with him. After finding out he is on the wrong train, Pnin glumly disembarks for a bus which will take him to his location, only to nearly miss this due to a mix up with his luggage, as the receptionist who had taken his luggage had to rush to the hospital as his wife was giving birth. After catching the bus and discarding of his luggage, he realises that he has left his lecture in his luggage; Pnin, exasperated and despairing, has an interesting experience at this time; “the wave of hopeless fatigue that suddenly submerged his top-heavy body, detaching him, as it were, from reality, was a sensation not utterly unknown to him. He found himself in a damp, green, purplish park, of the formal and funereal type, with the stress laid on sombre rhododendrons, glossy laurels, sprayed shade trees and closely clipped lawns; and hardly had he turned into an alley of chestnut and oak, than that eerier feeling, that tinge of unreality overpowered him completely…” This linking of Pnin’s grief with a subconscious escape from reality, or awareness that Pnin’s reality may be a façade, is a recurring theme within the novel, it is as if the comically unlucky sequence of events which preceded Pnin’s seizure, allow him to see that perhaps he is nothing but a pawn in the hands of a mocking, condescending, perhaps slightly nefarious narrator.The narrator then digresses, “Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man only exists insofar as he is separated from his surroundings…The sensation that poor Pnin was experience was very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and pregnable.” Perhaps Pnin becomes briefly aware of his existence purely within the mind of another person, after all involution is a constant theme within Nabokov’s works. In ‘Invitation to a Beheading’, the protagonist, Cincinnatus realises that he merely a fictional character in another mind, just before his executed; perhaps Pnin has a similar epiphany. For Nabokov, death was a character realising that they were merely a pawns in the elaborate author’s game of chess. Nabokov famously dubbed his characters galley-slaves, death acted not as a divestment from reality, but as a reminder that their reality was rooted in the mind of another, and therefore, not real at all; note, for example, the plastic one-dimensional description of Pnin’s environment as he is experiencing his seizure, or the user of the words “porous and pregnable” when describing his state of mind.The narrator then informs us of a time in Pnin’s childhood, when he as suffering from fever, and he noticed “Vision was but oval pain with oblique stabs of light; familiar shapes became the breeding ground of delusions.”, and later notes a certain pattern in his wallpaper, almost as if it was put there by design, by a malevolent designer, “It stood to reason that if the evil designer-the destroyer of mind, the friend of fever,-had concealed the key of pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey his everyday health.” Timofey recovers from the seizure, only to find a grey squirrel haunched up in front of him, with a peach stone in its paws; however the careful reader would have already seen this image a few paragraphs before, when young Timofey examines the picture near his bed of an old man sat on a bench, with a squirrel holding up a reddish in front of him, it is too cosy a coincidence to completely ignore, that Pnin would have an image of his older self in his bedroom. Pnin returns to the station, and despite his personal misfortunes, still has the kindness and consideration to ask the worker if his wife has given birth yet. Pnin’s destitution does not last long, however, as he is informed that he can get a lift to Cremona from a truck driver, where he gives a successful lecture; this story at least, has a happy ending.During the lecture, Pnin has another interesting vision, of people from his past; “A faint ripple stemming from his recent seizure was holding his fascinated attention…shyly smiling, sleek, dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a programme. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many old friends were scattered through the dim hall among more recent people. ” Again, this passage serves as a rejoinder to the earlier one about Pnin’s pupils finding his recollections humorous, when, perhaps, they were anything but. Moreso than this, this glimpse into Pnin’s past, gives him a depth which he is denied by his comical demeanour and incompetent actions, instead we see him briefly as any human being whose life has taken him from those he loves, who only has memories left of the people taken from him as a result of his two exiles, firstly from Russia and then from Europe.The next chapter begins with a beautiful, musical motif; “The famous Waindell College bells were in the midst of their morning chimes…the bells were musical in the silvery sun.” We are then treated to a plastic, picture card description of Waindell, where Pnin teaches. We are introduced to the Clementses, who require a tenant, as their daughter has recently married and moved away. They received a phone call from Pnin, (the exact nature of which the narrator is curiously unsure of as, for some unexplained reason he is unable to decipher telephone calls), who requires a new room to move into. At first John Clements is apprehensive, regarding Pnin as something of a freak, but Joan invites him over nonetheless; “Half an hour late, Joan glanced at the moribund cactuses in the sun-porch window and saw a rain-coated, hatless man with a head like a polished globe of copper, optimistically ringing the door of her neighbour’s beautiful, brick house. The old Scooty stood beside him, in much the same candid attitude as he.” Note the linking of the moribund cactus to Pnin, to the old “slowpoke dog”, Pnin is initially linked, in Joan’s mind at least, with decrepitude, of something old slowly falling apart and dying.Pnin chooses to take the room, just as he enters the room, we are treated to this beautiful image; “Pnin peered into Isabel’s pink-walled, white –flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow, scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass.” The night, in which Pnin moves in, the Clementses are throwing a small party. Jack Cockerell, one of the colleges best Pnin mimics, ignorant, or perhaps more than likely indifferent to Pnin’s being upstairs, is loudly mimicking Pnin. Pnin comes downstairs to make a complaint about the heating, but drops a hint to Joan, that he has heard everything which has been said downstairs; including Jack’s mocking him, but he decided not to pursue it any further, perhaps out of indifference, perhaps out of respect to the Clementses, though his dignified behaviour is in stark contrast to the vulgar behaviour of the guests.The Clementses eventually begin to warm to Pnin, and appreciate him for his Pninian oddities and quirks, their charwoman sees him sunbathing in with his Greek-Catholic cross on, and considers him a saint; later we learn that Pnin’s atavistic traits do not stop there, as one of his students, Betty Bliss, compares him to Buddha. We learn that Betty and Pnin once shared a mildly amorous relationship, Pnin once read her a Turgenev poem, entitled “How fair, how fresh were the roses”, which is about the wistful platonic love of an older man, for a younger girl- and his dreams of a happy, unattainable future with her. Pnin eulogizes to betty how Russian literary geniuses of the previous century were unappreciated and passed over by their wives for mediocrities, how Turgenev was made to play the fool by Pauline Viardot, a married woman who he was in love with, how Pushkin’s wife disliked his poetry and how Tolstoi’s wife preferred the company of a simple peasant to that of her great husband. We learn, however, that the reason Pnin and Betty are never able to get together is because of another woman who has Pnin’s heart; his ex-wife, Liza.“There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark. Whatever eyes Liza had, they seemed to reveal their essence, their precious stone water, only when you evoked them in thought, and then a blank, blind, moist aquamarine blaze shivered and stared as if a splash of sun and sea had got between your eyelids.” Liza’s beauty blazed like the sun before they eyes of poor, puissant, Pnin; Pnin fell utterly in love with Liza, and her dark brown hair and snow and rose complexion, with her cruelty and vulgarity, her mediocre poetry and asinine psychoanalysis. Liza, however, is far from in love with Pnin, is far from in love with anybody but herself, is vain, selfish and pretentious, and only marries him after a disastrous affair with a famous literary figure, which caused her to attempt to take her own life.Pnin, it turns out, is also blind to her artistic mediocrity and constant infidelities, and her relationship with a psychologist t named Eric Wind. Liza casually informs Pnin about the affair, and tells him she is leaving him, not long after he received a letter from Eric Wind telling him he wishes to marry Liza, but is unable to because of complications from his previous marriage, Pnin replies to both of them, telling them that he is due to leave for America soon. Not long after this letter, Liza returns to Pnin, pregnant with Eric’s child. “Those were probably the happiest in Pnin’s life-it was the height-it was a permanent glow of weighty, painful felicity –everything had a fairy tale tinge to it.” Fairy tale was perhaps, the most relevant description of Liza’s return, as it turns out that her return to him was a sham and was merely a ploy to get to America with his lover, Eric Wind, who is also on the ship, and who accosts Pnin during a chess match and breaks the news to a rather embarrassed Pnin at the ship’s bar; “Pnin, in silence, his face working, one palm still on the wet bar, had started to slither off his uncomfortable mushroom seat…” Eric lacks even the sensitivity to leave Pnin alone with his pain, poor Pnin, whose hopes are constantly dashed, whose quixotic love for Liza is founded on nothing but his own delusions, Pnin becomes more of a Don Quixote than ever, desiring his illusory Dulcinea with an unrequited passion, and just like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, Pnin is unable to see behind the façade of beauty he has created around her. Liza and her husband, Eric, set up a psychoanalytic group, whereby the members discussed their personal and private sorrows with other members in a rather banal attempt to collectivise their pain, Pnin, however, states that this collectivising of emotions sounded like the microcosm of Communism and other totalitarian regimes designed to erode our individuality, after all, “Why not leave private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people possess?”Liza is paying a visit, and Pnin is eagerly awaiting her arrival by bus. He is kept waiting some time, however, until she appears on the one bus he least expects her to. He is again entranced by her “sonorous voice…she hugged Pnin’s head and he felt the grapefruit fragrance of her neck.” Pnin pines for her, wishing to make the most of every moment with her, as he wearily wonders why she is visiting. She explains that Eric is indifferent to their son, Victor, and she wants Pnin to put something aside for his education, which he surely can do, due to his “microscopic needs”. Pnin agrees, whilst Liza tries to sell him a preposterous psychoanalytic story about him being Victor’s “water father”, to which Pnin reacts with mirth. In truth, Pnin would have helped with the fees because he still loves Liza and because it is the right thing to do, he does not mask his selfishness behind pretentious psychobabble, like Liza and Eric, he loves her because he cannot help it, because he has no choice in the matter, love is not a rational action whereby you can choose who you love and who you don’t, though he does wonder, “To hold her-to keep her- with her cruelty, her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure dry, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought, if people are reunited in heaven then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that dry, shrivelled, helpless, lame thing-her soul?”On his way back from dropping off Liza, he encounters a squirrel, who he thinks is feverish, and who he offers water. The squirrel eyes, him with contempt, drinks the water and makes off without the least sign of gratitude. In many ways, the squirrel can be read being symbolic of Liza’s relationship to Pnin. Whenever he sees she is in pain or trouble, he helps her, and asks nothing from her in return, save perhaps that she return his love. Yet, she responds with ingratitude and contempt to Pnin, “darling Timofey” and his “microscopic needs”, too self-absorbed to consider Pnin’s own emotion, scarcely realising that he is the one person she will ever meet who truly loves her. Pnin returns home, despondent, and whilst talking to Joan Clements, he breaks down in tears exclaiming “I have nofing!” wailed Pnin between loud, damp sniffs, “I have nofing left, nofing, nofing!” It would be easy to mock Pnin’s pathetic love for Liza, without considering that Pnin’s emotions are real, and that the love her gives her is the most selfless gift anybody would give her, a gift which she dismisses just as the feverish squirrel dismisses kindly Pnin’s gift of water.We are now treated to the rigmarole of academic life, not before the rather comical description of Pnin’s falling off his chair just as he is describing Pushkin’s morbid fear of death to his students. The pretentious depiction of a mural depicting the college President, President Poore, being handed scrolls by such luminary figures as Dostoevsky, Wagner and Confucius (the first two, Nabokov held in complete contempt), before introducing us to the painter of the mural, the pseudo-intellectual Russian painter, Komarov, who is held, along with his wife, held in high esteem on the campus, despite being a venerable fraud.
The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.Poor Professor Timofey Pnin! He just can't catch a break! I really enjoyed reading Pnin, as I enjoy reading just about everything by V. Nabokov, but I feel an inadequacy in reviewing his work, because it feels so reluctant to be reviewed. On the surface, the story is a simple sort of Russian, Saul-Bellovian mid-life crisis; on a character level, Pnin is a sort of lost flotilla at sea, and no one wants him, not his colleagues nor his expatriot friends nor his ex-wife. But in typical Nabokovian fashion all that sympathy is flipped upon it's head when we discover that the narrator is someone from Pnin's past, someone with a bitterness or disdain for the pathetic Pnin, with his bald head, stocky build, and suffocating misfortune. How much of Pnin can we believe?I feel strange sometimes reading mid-life crises novels. I feel a sort of detachment because I am only half way to mid-life myself, and I think when I turn the last page "I need to read this again with another 20 years of perspective." But Pnin is a different animal entirely, sure I will read it again when I'm 40, but I'll likely read it again in a year or two anyway, because it is bliss. Pnin, though middle aged, is almost childlike: physically he strikes no imposing figure, emotionally he is quite immature and inexperienced in the areas of love, friendship, etc., and his clumsiness is irresistibly sympathetic and redolent of playground follies. I don't see myself in 20 years as a Pnin, but rather I see my Pnin-ness 10-15 years back! But Pnin's childlike-ness is not accompanied by a childish-ness, we see in Pnin a cohabitation of youthful esprit and gaucherie, but a solemnity and remorse of agedness: Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. I apologize for the extensive quotation, but it is observed here in this remembrance of Mira both his childlike solipsism and also his age-wrought sensitivity. He has taught himself to ignore reality, to ignore what has happened to him, to live outside the gates of truth in the chaos of fleeting bliss, evading reality's magnetism. This solipsism, this evasion of all which contradicts one's sangfroid and contentment, is something so puerile, so immature, that the reader feels a sympathy and also a condemnation on Pnin. At once it seems that he blocks out Mira's death because his love for her is so strong, but then he reminds us that it was only a brief affair. It is not Mira's death which perturbs Pnin, but death in general. It's not necessarily a fear of his own death creeping towards him, but an aversion to the existence of death. But these concerns over death, Mira's death, are parleyed with such a knowing solemnity, one which speaks from a life lived, and a life not quite buried in the past, but which reaches into the present, which elucidates the present even if involuntarily.Memory, life-lived and life-past, are very central to this novel of Nabokov's, as with many of his other novels; though the past is cosseted with a softer, if not more serious, touch than, say, Pale Fire, where past-life is mixed with a question of delusion, or Lolita where childhood experience is held up as a funhouse mirror excuse for perversion. In Pnin the past is a solemn, though still humorous, thing. And the beautiful writing radiates with both festivity and ceremony at alternating turns: humor and tragedy commingled. But that ceremony is reversed, nothing can be taken seriously because the man telling us about Pnin, is perhaps the least qualified to do so. He is the man who replaces him at school, he is the man who replaces him in his wife's affections, he is the man who displaces him, who drives him away. He is the sinister schemer behind Pnin's story, trapping him in at every labyrinthine turn, chasing him off in the direction he pleases. He is a shadowy figure, whispering his modus operandi: "Some people-and I am one of them-hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam," as he ensures that our (and his own) schadenfreudig appetites are appeased.Playful Pnin, pathetic Pnin, persnickety Pnin, paunchy Pnin, Pallid Pnin and the Summer Sunburn, philosophic Pnin, philological Pnin, Pnin the picayune, and plenary Pnin and all the panoply of Pnins in the masquerade of tragicomedic Pnin. Yes, Pnin is both sentimental ceremony and Bacchic festival of post-modernist games, and it's one I recommend to anyone who has a few hours to devote to logophilic frolicking, tragi-parodic gameplay, and the alliterative altercations between life and logos.
What do You think about Pnin (2004)?
Ciascuno di noi ha il proprio metro di misura per valutare un libro letto. A onor del vero la sottoscritta ne ha più d’uno, perché spesso è d’istinto, quando ancora sto sotto l’effetto della lettura appena terminata, che assegno le stelline, senza rifletterci (e magari ripensandoci dopo). Nel caso di “Pnin”, non è andata così, ci ho pensato e mi sono detta: “ Come posso non dare cinque stelle a un romanzo che durante la lettura mi ha deliziato per lo stile raffinato e brillantissimo, mi ha divertito e al contempo reso triste, mi ha fatto affezionare al protagonista e portato a schierarmi dalla sua parte in ogni disavventura che gli capita sopra? Come posso non dare cinque stelle quando durante la giornata, nel mezzo di una qualsiasi incombenza quotidiana, mi sono trovata a pensare a Pnin e a quale altra sventura gli potesse ancora capitare?”Pnin è un piccolo (inteso come poco voluminoso) capolavoro, il cui protagonista -l’imbranato, distratto, maniacale, ingenuo, innamorato, puro di cuore professore universitario Pnin, nato in Russia, emigrato in Francia allo scoppio della rivoluzione e poi negli anni ’40 trasferito in America ad insegnare il russo- è un personaggio indimenticabile, un vero e proprio “uomo qualunque”, un ometto buffo che non si nota se non per prenderlo in giro per il suo inglese approssimativo, per il suo abbigliamento singolare e per le stranezze cui la limpida intelligenza lo costringe, come sapere a memoria il complicato svolgersi del tempo nel romanzo Guerra e Pace. Pnin è un omino dolce che desta ammirazione per la dignità e il candore, unico per la signorilità stile vecchia Europa che lo accompagna nell’indecifrabile mondo americano. Pnin è un antieroe tenero che desta compassione per il suo essere in bilico tra il nostalgico ricordo dell’infanzia nella terra russa e la fiduciosa speranza nel futuro di integrazione in terra americana, rendendolo di fatto senza radici, un dolce e svagato vagabondo, figlio, insieme alla straordinaria galleria di personaggi che gli stanno intorno, nato da un mix sapientemente dosato dal genio di Nabokov tra spunti autobiografici dello scrittore, personaggi del mondo universitario americano da lui conosciuti e protagonisti della letteratura russa, a partire dal Gogol de Le anime morte.
—Sandra
Reading "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov would require our familiarity regarding his writing style and his sense of humor. We may start with his "Collected Stories" (Penguin Books, 2010) since we can start with any story in which we can be interested and thus find its reading enjoyable. I would like to recommend the following:1. A Letter that Never Reached Russia,2.A Nursery Tale,3. The Visit to the Museum4. Solus Rex, and5. First Love, etc.Linguistically, this 169-page novel has presented Pnin, an assistant professor emigrated from Russia to teach in an American campus, who daringly uses English "a language he has yet to master" (back cover) in different contexts and we can't help being amused, for instance:"...'Information, please,' said Pnin. 'Where stops four o'clock bus to Cremona?''Right across the street,' briskly answered the employee without looking up. ...And with the national informality that always nonplussed Pnin, the young man shoved the bag into a corner of his nook."Quittance?' queried Pnin, Englishing the Russian for 'receipt' (kvitantsiya).'What's that?''Number?' tried Pnin.... (p. 10)" And this one: "... If his Russian was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty ('dzeefeecooltsee' in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to remove the extra Russian moisture from t's and d's before the vowels he so quaintly softened. His explosive 'hat' ('I never go in a hat even in winter') differed from the common American pronunciation of 'hot' (...) only by its briefer duration, ... (pp. 54-55)" Or this one:t"...'You are very hungry?''No, sir. Not particularly.''My name is Timofey,' said Pnin, as they made themselves comfortable at a window table in the shabby old dinner. 'Second syllable pronounced as "muff", ahksent on last syllable, "ey" as in "prey" but a little more protracted. "Timofey Pavlovich Pnin", which means "Timofey the son of Paul." The pahtronymic has the ahksent on the first syllable ... (p. 89)"
—umberto
Pnin may give the appearance of being a 'slight' work -- compared, at any rate, to Nabokov's alleged ( -- I say 'alleged', only because I have not yet read either Lolita or Pale Fire... I'm working up to them --) masterpieces. And so I see a lot of four and three stars. But in my (and it is not allegedly, but often demonstrated) uninformed opinion, this is a mistake -- this is a slight book, indeed! (The punctuation here is deliberate -- as I want to mislead you.) Written as he was finishing, or on finishing Lolita, one has the feeling that he 'needed a break'.... But it is a mature work, of a writer of genius.Then again, part of the 'slightness' comes merely from the fact that there is no tragedy in it; and from the fact that Pnin, unlike so many of Nabokov's other figures, is not sick..., but is truly charming. Goodness often feels 'slight'.At any way, to call this 'slight' is like calling a prelude of Bach's 'slight' -- It is, but...I can also say that Nabokov's eye is quite remarkable. Having myself grown up in the NY Russian émigré community -- I remember my grandparents talking about Kerensky, who lived downtown, and whom they knew slightly -- even the description of the old Russian putting on his coat, and the gestures involved... is astonishingly accurate. (And of course, I'm always thrilled when any good book puts its characters on the 104 -- as Pnin and Nabokov (the narrator) sway and strap-hold their way one night....; another example is Mr. Sammler, who meets the Negro with the cashmere coat, on the 104... going south from 116th St., if I recall...). But I digress....I can also assure you from long and bitter experience that Nabokov's description of the vain and empty dummkopfs who populate the third-rate (err... let's say, 'third-tier'..., since telling the truth is not considered "good form" in such circles) colleges and universities, couldn't be funnier or more on-target. As I can attest -- from bitter, bitter experience.......or did I say that already?Anyway... GREAT book!IM (allegedly) HO
—AC
