Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov is one of my favorite authors. Lolita and Pale Fire are two of my favorite books by any author. Now I’ll need to add Pnin to that list. Pnin is smaller scaled than those other two. I put it with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Isherwood’s A Single Man, as perfect miniatures, an icon for a home altar rather than a fresco for the wall of the church. I’ve also read Nabokov’s later novel, Ada, which is longer in length (much longer) and grander in scope and ambition, as though Nabokov were reaching for the earlier modernist masterpieces of Joyce or Proust. But Ada is ponderous and weirdly self-concerned. That novel’s strangeness regarding an alternate Earth is simply strange, where the peculiarities of Lolita, Pale Fire, or Pnin, are their charm.

Pnin was written in English at the same time Nabokov was finishing his work on Lolita. The 2004 essay by David Lodge that introduces the Everyman’s Library edition of Pnin I read speculates that Nabokov was aware of the challenges he would face getting Lolita published and wrote Pnin as a series of seven short stories for the New Yorker as a kind of insurance, guaranteeing income against the uncertain fate of Lolita. Lolita was not immediately published in the United States but came out (in English) from a publisher in Paris in 1955. Graham Greene praised Lolita as the book of the year, making the American public very curious about a supposedly great, supposedly shocking book they couldn’t easily get their hands on. (Even France banned the book, though contraband copies circulated.) Pnin had its own troubles finding a publisher, due to the short length and unusual form somewhere between a novel and a set of inter-connected short stories, but after first submitting the work for publication in 1955, Pnin finally found a publisher in 1957. Curiosity about the author drove interest in Pnin and reading it proved that Nabokov was a serious literary artist, not a pornographer. When Lolita was published in America the following year, it was a smash. Nabokov earned enough to quit his teaching job at Cornell and live on his writing alone. He moved to Switzerland. Pale Fire came next (1962), then his translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin, then his memoir Speak, Memory (which I’ve read and recommend) and then the novels Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! ((1974). He died in Montreux in 1977.

Timofey Pnin, like Nabokov at the time, is a Russian emigre, teaching Russian language and literature in a North Eastern American university. For Pnin, the university is Waindell College, in New York. The book is in seven chapters, each chapter an independent story, but linked by the same central character and setting. As the series unfolds, more is revealed about Pnin’s background: born in Russia, life in Europe between the wars, immigration to the United States. Details mentioned in passing in one story are expanded on later. The stories echo among themselves in other ways as well, for instance a squirrel reappears in every story in various guises, although in Chapter Five the squirrel is only inferred from the movement in trees following a gunshot. Each chapter comes in several numbered subsections.

Chapter One. Pnin takes the wrong train. Pnin has been invited to give a lecture at the Women’s Club in the neighboring town of Cremona. It’s 1950. He takes the wrong train. He suffers further misadventures in getting where he needs to go. The chapter introduces the humble, neurotic, but sympathetic character of Pnin, as well as a first person narrator who is the author of Pain’s story but who also seems to know Pnin personally and who will gradually become more involved in the story itself.

Chapter Two. Pnin rents a room. Pnin finds lodging in the house of Joan Clements and her husband Laurence; a room recently vacated by the Clements’ daughter who has married and moved to California. Pnin is visited by his ex-wife, Liza Wind (taking the name of her current husband, Dr. Eric Wind). The narrator tells the story of Timofey and Liza’s meeting and marriage in Europe before the war, and her leaving him shortly after giving birth to their son. They speak about their son, Victor. Liza and Eric are divorcing. Liza wants Timofey to have a closer relationship to his son and to send money to Victor, who will be attending next year a prep school called St. Bartholomew’s near Boston.

Chapter Three. Pnin spends a day at college. He carries a book with him all day that the library has told him another patron has requested, only to learn at the end of the day that it is Pnin himself who submitted the request when he actually meant to request the next volume in the series. His landlords, Joan and Laurence, return from California with their daughter who has decided to divorce her new husband, meaning Pnin will need to find a new place to live.

Chapter Four. Pnin’s son, Victor, pays a visit. We learn more about Pnin’s childhood, and about Victor’s childhood with his mother Liza and stepfather, Eric. Victor is a genius child and a brilliant artist. Pnin prepares for Victor’s visit by buying presents of a soccer ball and a copy of a minor Jack London novel. Victor cares nothing for sports, and his reading tastes are rather more advanced.

Chapter Five. Pnin spends the day at a country house. Pnin is a guest of some friends who host a kind of vacation home away from home for ex-pat Russians. The chapter contains an absolutely devastating reminiscence of an early crush young Pnin had on a girl named Mira and his speculations on what may have happened to her during the war.

Chapter Six. Pnin hosts a party. Although the novel seems to encompass only a single college year, we’re told it’s now 1954, four years after the first story. Pnin has been at the college since 1945 and expects he’ll now receive tenure. Pnin has finally found a place to live he’d like to make permanent and invites his college friends for a “house heating” party. (Pnin’s difficulties with English are a regular, humorous theme of the novel). The party is a success. But at the end of the party he receives the bad news that his protector at the University in the German department is leaving for a new position. The French department doesn’t want a Russian, either. And although an “old friend” of Pnin’s, who has been invited to take a position as a lecturer in the English department has a place for him, Pnin refuses to work under the man.

Chapter Seven. Pnin leaves Waindell. This chapter switches entirely to the point of view of the narrator. He remembers meeting Pnin as boys together in Russia. Later, they move in the same circle in Europe. The narrator even romances Liza before Pnin, and when the narrator refuses Liza, and Liza recovers from a suicide attempt, Pnin marries her. The narrator and Pnin continue to cross paths, in Europe and in New York. Now the narrator has arrived in Waindell for his new position and spends the night in the home of a Waindell faculty member who does mocking imitations of Pnin. The next morning the narrator sees his “old friend” Pnin driving away and calls out to him but is unable to catch his attention.

What a poor impression of this novel it is to give a plot summary. The pleasure is in the playfulness of the story-telling, the deductive work it takes to build up the story from the teasing details Nabokov scatters in unlikely places, the specificity of the character and the sympathy one develops for him, and the beauty and inventiveness of the language. My goodness, what Nabokov does with English! Perhaps it is because English is not Nabokov’s first language that he is able to have such freedom with it. Every sentence is fresh and alive. He didn’t grow up with our idioms so the writing is never cliched. He finds ways to put together words and phrases no native speaker would imagine, and thus reveals beauty and possibility in the language we native-tongued speakers, blinded by familiarity, don’t grasp ourselves.

I seldom finish a book and immediately want to read it again. This is one.