Pnin - (Vintage International) by Vladimir Nabokov (Paperback)

About the Book

Readers meet one of Nabokov's funniest and most heartrending characters: Timofey Pnin, a professor of Russian at an American college, who lectures in a language he cannot master.

Book Synopsis

One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. 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.

"Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect." --Chicago Tribune

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 misunder-standings, 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.

Review Quotes

"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." --John Updike

"Has there ever been a better novel written about a fumbling Russian émigré?" --Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

"Hilariously funny and of a sadness." --Graham Greene, acclaimed author of The Quiet American and The End of the Affair

"Pnin's vita, though its essence is saintliness, is yet a work of brilliant magic and fabulous laughter." --The New Republic

"Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect." --Chicago Tribune

"Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way the masters can--to laughter that is near to tears." --The Guardian

About the Author

One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, VLADIMIR NABOKOV was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.