Most well-known for Lolita, Nabokov can be a difficult author to get your teeth into. Notorious for a) being a bit of a weirdo (Lolita is about a grown man’s infatuation with a twelve year old girl after all) and b) toying with his readers by spinning clever double meanings into his prose, I admit that I’ve actually given up on some of his books. Pnin however is not only great, but also strikes a chord in our current lockdown state of affairs, as at it’s core this book deals with the themes of loneliness and isolation.
Originally published in the New Yorker, Pnin is a book is a series of short stories about Professor Timofey Pnin, a Russian intellectual who fled his homeland in the wake of the Russian revolution and now teaches Russian at the fictional Waindell College. The novel centres around Professor Pnin’s myriad struggles with adapting to American life. A combination of dry humour and loving nostalgia serves to paint a heart-rending portrait of the disoriented Russian emigre (a common sight on American university campuses after WW2). Despite the book’s laugh-out-loud moments, you cannot help but feel protective of poor Pnin, who speaks so eloquently in his own language and yet stumbles along so painfully in English.
On the face of it Pnin is may be comedy, but Nabokov uses this genre to deal with the more painful themes of isolation and exile. And the heart of the story still rings true today. How many people are there around the world who can relate perfectly to feeling like a fool when struggling to create a new life in a new language and culture? How many immigrants were once high-achieving academics in their home countries but due to circumstances often out of their control have had to forge a new life in a country that only sees them as the foreigner who cannot speak the language? Nevertheless, despite the tragedy at its core, the bumbling misadventures of Pnin are bound to make you smile.
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