Customer Reviews

Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel

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Professor Diment's book moves from biography to literary intrigue quickly and delightfully. The intrigue itself, of course, has been out in the open for quite a while---that Pnin, the stodgy and stumbling professor, was inspired by one of Vladimir Nabokov's colleagues at Cornell, Marc Szeftel.

There's plenty of material on that in the book, but the real treat are the stories on university politics, the strange and shimmering links between art and the "real", the compassionate sketches of very odd characters (including Szeftel himself, as well as Nabokov's first biographer, a Kinbote-like figure), and some seriously funny endnotes. _Pnin_ ends triumphantly, and so does Diment's _Pniniad_, with the reader discovering the life-story of a man who would otherwise be an interesting side-note---what the reader gets is a sort of roman a clef written on the margins of fiction.

My husband was at Cornell during the tenures of both Nabokov and Szeftel, and we've both just read "Pnin" and "Pniniad." As far as "Pniniad" is concerned, neither of us is a literary scholar, but we both enjoyed the book immensely. For what it's worth, my husband feels there's no question that Szeftel was the model for Pnin; he instantly recognized the fumbling and bumbling, the dry lectures entirely read from a text, the rather sad air clinging to him. Unburdened by any memories, I saw Pnin quite differently, and Diment captures the heroic, tragic and in some ways triumphant aspects of Pnin's character that appear in later chapters in the novel. Diment also clearly lays out the argument that Nabokov and Szeftel were bound by the common experiences of exile and immigration, by adjusting to American academia, by overcoming barriers of language and culture. For both scholars and non-scholars out there, Diment has laid out a clear, highly readable, well-reasoned argument both for Szeftel's being the inspiration for Pnin, and for Pnin's being a reflection of Nabokov himself.

This first-rate scholarly study of the relationship between Marc Szeftel and Vladimir Nabokov has been endorsed by such heavyweight academics as Brian Boyd and Robert Alter, and I can only add that if there is such a thing as required reading for non-specialists in Nabokovopolis, this should be at the top of the list.

Galya Diment provides a fairly conclusive argument that Mark Szeftel was an important model for the Russian Master's third novel written in English, the second in America (if it had ever been in doubt, a matter on which I'm not clear).

The heart of the book consists of five chapters and a conclusion, and also contains appendixes from Marc Szeftel's archive and own writings. The latter includes of selections from his diaries, which make it pretty obvious that Szeftel wasn't nearly as comfortable a solipsist as the alter ego fate appears to have dealt him. And man, did he ever know it. Some of the passages included in Diment's study read like outtakes from a rough draft of Kinbote's, without the miniscule amount of self-awareness the fictive scholar was able to muster. They certainly exhibit nothing like the former king's rather heady imagination, in which readers have taken so much delight. What is there, and what Diment makes all to clear, is a great deal of sadness. The sadness of an émigré, the sadness of a scholar, and perhaps even the sadness of a century.

Szeftel seems to have toiled long and hard in the academic vineyards, at times with scholars as notable as Roman Jacobsen, and for reasons that perhaps only Nabokov himself knows never really achieved his due regard as an academic. More to the point, he seems to have settled just outside the realm of humiliation and some grand joke at the hands of everyone from the great writer to colleagues and even his students. The operative paradox here is that Szeftel would have remained one of life's unknown little tragedies had it not been for his immortalization as the Russian specialist at Waindell, but as Diment evinces he may well have never felt himself to be quite so tragic a character at all if he hadn't crossed paths with the accomplished poet-lepodiatrist-teacher-scholar-writer from St. Petersberg. One of Szeftel's books was praised by Nabokov, he was once on the verge of actually working with Nabokov, and he long contemplated scholarly studies of Lolita even after he became one of the models for Pnin. In the end he produced a few anecdotes about exchanges with Nabokov during the time they shared together at Cornell.

Along the way, Diment notes that a case has been made for considering Pnin an even greater work than the now monolithic Lolita, and by no less a scholar than Michael Wood in `The Magician's Doubts.' The reason for this originates in the rather more organically developed theme of the Double, a theme Szeftel himself consciously noted and, like several others (to Nabokov's own consternation) tied to Doeseovsky. She expertly employs the work of other scholars to illuminate what is particularly special, if not unique, about Pnin's relation to the novel he inhabits:

"The most dramatic declaration of Pnin's independence and VN's [the self-identified narrator of the novel] "just deserts" comes from Charles Nicol... Nicol actually goes as far as to describe the two men as atgonists and their relationship as a struggle between the "devilish" narrator and the innocent protagonist, in which Pnin "has confronted Nabokov and won." (p.56)

It seems to me that Nicol overstates his case a little here, but I do think that Diment's account of the narratological ambiguity that grew as the novel progressed and its roots in the brief conjunction of the fates of Szeftel and Nabokov is illuminating.

Diment is entirely evenhanded in her treatment of everyone involved, and the only particular bias consistently shown is her high regard for the Northwest, Szeftel's final home and where she herself teaches (at the University of Washington, sponsors of the press that published this book). She notes that Szeftel never much enjoyed the region himself, and perhaps even saw it as the true boondocks, one of the many injuries to be suffered in a long and yet disappointing life. In its way, this is one of the saddest books ever written. But it is gracefully written, and, as she says in the conclusion, a real tribute to the model, to the author, and to our ability to transform life through fiction. Marc Szeftel certainly did his best to partake of that transformation.