Pnin

Pnin Review

Pnin — published in 1957, assembled from stories that had appeared in The New Yorker — is Nabokov at his most unexpectedly tender. The novel follows Timofey Pnin, a Russian émigré professor of Russian literature at the fictional Waindell College in upstate New York, through a series of episodes that are individually comic and collectively heartbreaking. Pnin boards the wrong train. He gives a lecture to the wrong audience. He acquires a washing machine with elaborate ceremony and then throws his landlady’s son’s ball into it. He navigates American idiom, American bureaucracy, and American social life with the earnest incomprehension of a man who is perpetually a step behind a world that was not designed for him.

The comedy is real and generous — Nabokov is genuinely funny, which not all of his admirers want to acknowledge — but it operates in permanent proximity to something much sadder. Pnin was a young man in pre-revolutionary Russia, he had a first love, Mira Belochkin, who died in a German concentration camp; he had a country, a language, a world that was destroyed before he was forty. He carries all of this with him through the corridors of Waindell College, invisible to the colleagues who find him merely ridiculous. The novel’s emotional centre is a passage in which Pnin allows himself briefly to remember Mira, and the memory is rendered with a restraint that makes it more devastating than any extended lament could be.

What distinguishes Pnin from Nabokov’s other novels is the warmth of its regard for its protagonist. Nabokov was not generally a warm writer — his aesthetic detachment could shade into coldness, and some of his characters feel like specimens rather than people. Pnin is different: he is observed with the affection of a writer who has drawn on his own experience of displacement and loss. The novel does not sentimentalise Pnin’s situation — his comedy is real, his limitations are real — but it treats him with a respect that makes his repeated humiliations land with genuine force.

The final chapter introduces a narrator who turns out to have a history with Pnin, and the revelation shifts the novel’s emotional register one last time. We have been reading through a particular perspective without fully realising it, and what that perspective has been doing to Pnin — the ways it has both preserved and diminished him — becomes suddenly visible. It is a quiet, devastating structural move, entirely characteristic of Nabokov’s method, and it gives the novel a resonance that its deceptively modest surface does not immediately suggest.