Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) [Hardcover]

Vladimir Nabokov (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 6, 2004 | Series: Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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 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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nabokov fans will be disappointed by narrator Stefan Rudnicki's stiff, staid performance in this audio version of the author's 13th novel. Told in a series of vignettes, the story follows Russian immigrant and professor Timofey Pavlovich Pnin as he boards the wrong train on his way to deliver a lecture, loses his luggage, struggles with the English language, hunts for living quarters, deals with his ex-wife, and throws a faculty party. Rudnicki's narration is clear and steady, but fails to capture the playfulness of Nabokov's prose and the humor of the text. Instead, Rudnicki's tone is variously stiff, needlessly booming, or monotone. He does, however, provide a wide range of voices for the cast of characters. His rendition of the title character-which sounds like a hybrid of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat and Soviet comedian Yakov Smirnoff-is dynamic and entertaining. Listeners will be left wishing Rudnicki had infused more of his narration with those qualities. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Review

“Hilariously funny and of a sadness.” –Graham Greene

“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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400041988
• ISBN-13: 978-1400041985
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #166,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing ficticvbn ral books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

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#42 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

#42 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 100 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Nabokov creates his own rules in this satiric novel January 19, 2004

By Debbie Lee Wesselmann TOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Vladimir Nabokov is so often called a "master stylist" that it is easy to forget that he is an adept storyteller as well. Even though PNIN, one of his lesser known works, threatens to disappear under the gorgeous stylistic turns, it is ultimately the pathetic title character and his nemesis/narrator who drive this novel. Pnin is a Russian instructor at a college, and, due to his solitary existence and his failure to grasp the subtleties of English, he has become a running joke to most of his colleagues. He is fussy, awkward, and usually clueless. The novel reads as episodes in Pnin's life: losing his lecture notes on a train he should never have been on; his weekend with other Russian immigrants; the crushing love and hope he experiences when his ex-wife visits him; a party he gives for his colleagues. The narrator's the biting and hilarious commentary about Pnin and those he associates with keeps the reader from taking these events too seriously. But should we?

In the writing of this work, Nabokov breaks all the rules. His shifts in points-of-view, his sometimes favoring of lengthy exposition over scene, his dropping of plots and subplots just as they get going all work precisely because he is such a skilled novelist and knows the effect of abandoning conventions. In dashing the reader's hopes, his style takes tenacious hold of the reader's imagination; we learn to trust the voice - even if we shouldn't. This last is what is truly brilliant about the novel: we allow ourselves to be swept into a story of non-events and pathos, laughing along the way and becoming in essence yet another of Pnin's mocking colleagues.

Students of literature and book discussion groups can discover a wealth of topics here: Is the narrator reliable? How can the narrator be both omniscient and a specific character? How does the touching story of Pnin's first love fit with the mocking tone in the rest of the novel? What is the range of the Russian immigrant experience Nabokov supplies? Is Pnin heroic or merely pathetic?

While PNIN is hardly the masterpiece that PALE FIRE or LOLITA is, it has its own rewards. Once I advanced past the first chapter, I didn't want to leave this odd, Old World character. Highly recommended, especially if you've already read one or more of Nabokov's other works.

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, Reader, This One Is GOOD. October 31, 1998

By Eugene G. Barnes

Format:Paperback

The only recommendation I had for this book was the ever-evolving readers' list that Random House is keeping on-line, which tallies the votes of what readers believe are the 100 best English language novels of the 20th Century. "Pnin" showed up near the bottom of the list, but with a respectable number of votes. Having always wanted to get past the Nabokov of "Lolita" fame, I took the plunge. What I found knocked my socks off. If you know ANY Russian intelligencia emigres, you know Timofei Pnin. Pnin is an unsubtle chucklehead with a heart of gold who manages to live a great deal of his life in an academic cocoon, as utterly clueless about how he is being arbitrarily protected by his dean as he is clueless about the comic effect he has on others. Doesn't sound promising? Believe me, Nabokov's deft brush turns this slender thread of an idea into a veritable War-and-Peace of an exercise in how we react to others in our life. Dare we laugh at others? We certainly laugh at Pnin. We howl. How dare we? I place this book among the top five percent of the many books I've read over the last five years.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pnin May 8, 2004

By Vladimir Miskovic

Format:Paperback

The overwhelming success and notoriety of Lolita has sometimes had the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of Nabokov's other treasures. Pnin is one such gem, being his third English novel, fragments of which were published during the 50's in the New Yorker.
It is the account of a Timofey Pnin, professor of Classical Russian Literature at Waindell College, a course failing year after year to garner deserved interest. The novel is a succession of carefully blended time morphs, the beginning and end forming a kind of cycle, wherein the reader is made privy to various comical blunders of Pnin's academic life, as well as his painful memories of an exiled Russian past, bloody revolutions and a war-torn Europe. Pnin is proud to have adopted America as a new home, being largely oblivious of his total incompetence in the English language and his role as the butt of many cruel and childish jokes, perpetrated by the rest of Waindell staff. He lives alone, with the pangs of unrequited love and a son whom he barely has the chance to see. Pnin is a charming character, capable of inspiring a spectrum of different emotions.
Such is the plot on surface, deceptively simplistic, though having a complex clockwork running behind scenes. Things take a surprising turn when the narrator is revealed, and Nabokov himself (Mr.N) makes a bewildering appearance in his own book, inviting a complete re-interpretation of many key events. The careful reader will be left pondering the motifs of the squirrel, the identity of the novel's `Evil Maker' and the significance of Pnin's flashbacks. Some logical paradoxes are posed by the novel: there are puzzles to be worked out.
The work is slender and as such is considered one of Nabokov's more accessible novels, which can be enjoyed on a few different levels. Vladimir Nabokov did rely on a number of his own experiences, being a professor throughout several colleges in the U.S. (Stanford, Cornell, Harvard), to poke a little fun at the mechanism of academic life, though unlike poor Pnin, he possessed an unmatched control and execution of the English language. Much of the novel's translucent beauty is captured so perfectly in Nabokov's prose that many sentences deserve to be re-read several times for full appreciation of what John Updike called the `ecstasy' effect that is evident in the late master's writing.

"A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin's shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again." (Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin)

In such thrilling undulations of verse will the memory of this novel preserve itself in the mind of its sensitive reader.