About the Book

(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 emigre 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.

Product Details

Media: Hardcover Book, 143 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Everyman's Library (Apr. 30th, 2004)

ISBN-10: 1400041988

ISBN-13: 9781400041985

Dimensions: 5.26 x 8.32 x 0.65 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.65 lbs

• Categories: Literary Fiction and Literature