Here's a hero you can root for

Pnin remains a true testament to Nabokov’s unique ability to describe situations both highly comical and deeply moving.

Timofey Pnin — no other name in modern literature seems to have been solely created to encourage the reader to speak through the nose as she pronounces it. Everything about this man, a Russian exile in the post-war USA, seems designed to delight us and evoke sympathy during his bumbling misadventures in a society that is completely alien to him.

When he first appears in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, the eponymous professor is sitting in a train and is described thus: “…he began impressively with that great brown dome of his…but ended, somewhat disappointingly in a pair of spindly legs…”

Pnin, first published in 1957, was Nabokov’s 13th novel and his fourth in English. Prior to emigrating to the States, Nabokov had studied in Cambridge and lived and worked in Berlin and Paris. He made a reputation for himself during this time as a leading émigré writer in the Russian language, publishing short stories, poetry, plays and novels. But in America, to which he fled in 1940 with his Jewish wife Vera and son Dmitri in order to escape Nazi-occupied France, he had to start from the beginning, working as a Russian language and literature professor at Wellesley College and then at Cornell University. Nabokov wrote Pnin — a few critics called it more a series of comic sketches than a novel — whilst struggling with the book that would catapult him to the literary stratosphere, Lolita.

He hoped that Pnin would give him enough of a commercial success to guarantee the publication of a more difficult and challenging work. It did in some ways — after international controversies and bans, when Lolita was published in America in 1958, it sold in the millions.

Pnin remains a true testament to Nabokov’s unique ability to master a second language completely and use it to describe situations both highly comical and deeply moving. Reading his sentences, the reader can’t help but think that no other writer could possibly mould and sculpt the English language in this manner. The laughter he triggers creeps up on you as you read about Pnin discovering he’s boarded the wrong train or as he unhappily tramps around the college town where he lives and teaches.

While on the surface Pnin — which began life on the pages of the New Yorker as short stories — is a comic novel, it’s also a deeply affecting look at the Russian émigrés who escaped first the collapse of Tsarist Russia and then the horrors of the Second World War. The professor’s lost love, Mira, a Jewish woman who died in the Holocaust, haunts his memories and always seems present in the background, a ghost keeping watch over him. For anyone who’s felt like a fish out of water (which is most people), Pnin gives us the hero to root for — one who deserves our care and goodwill as he navigates the mystery of railway rules and American humour and figures out how to make a new home in a strange land.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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