Pnin

Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

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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 1950's. 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.


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  • Liata
    Mar 11, 2025
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  • Dec 17, 2024
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    Pnin has been reviewed and explained and illuminated by many, many readers more knowledgeable and eloquent than I am, so suffice to say that this is a novel and a character to be cherished; a delightful, tender, sly, wise little mirror-twin (or T. Wynn?) to Lolita, written at the same time and in parallel, and its notorious narrator.

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  • lizetteratura
    Mar 05, 2025
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