Pnin (Vintage International)($15.95Value)

Description

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character.  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. “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 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. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." — John Updike “Has there ever been a better novel written about a fumbling Russian émigré?” — Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends “Hilariously funny and of a sadness.” — Graham Greene, acclaimed author of The Quiet American and The End of the Affair “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 Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. ofessor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, VLADIMIR NABOKOV was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. INTRODUCTION by David Lodge   Vladimir Nabokov was a literary genius. There is no other word with which to describe a writer who in mid-life became a stylistic virtuoso in a language that was not his mother tongue. Circumstances – which is to say, the convulsions of twentieth century European politics – impelled him to achieve this feat, exchanging Russian for English as the medium of his art (as well as acquiring an enviable fluency in French along the way). He was born, in 1899, into a patrician Russian family who were driven into exile by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. After studying at Cambridge University in England, he scraped a living as a writer in Berlin, and later in Paris, publishing novels in Russian (some of which were translated variously into English, German and French) without making any great impression on the literary world. He came to America in 1940, with his Jewish wife, Vera, and their son, Dmitri, as virtually penniless refugees from Nazi-occupied France. In spite of lacking conventional academic credentials, Nabokov was able to find employment as a university teacher of Russian and comparative literature, first at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and from 1948 at Cornell University in upstate New York. Over the same period he began to rebuild his career as a writer of fiction. His first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) had the misfortune to appear only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was barely noticed. But his essays and stories attracted the attention and admiration of editors and fellow writers, and in 1944