Pnin is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written at the same time as his more famous Lolita. But Pnin is, to my mind at least, a much more enjoyable book than Lolita is. It is helped in this by its protagonist, the lovely and lovable Professor Tim Pnin, an American of Imperial Russian extraction like Nabokov himself, but one whose success in falling into American culture, his naturalization notwithstanding, has not been nearly so successful.
What this leads to is a series of comic misunderstandings and slapstick humour, bad accents and worse grammar, all of which ultimately make Pnin an almost light-hearted and innocently enjoyable book. But beneath the surface there is an unmistakable note of sadness, a mourning for the past that Pnin has left behind him in his homeland and is unable to forget altogether, and a sense of narrative sympathy towards all those who history treats as pawns or playthings of its grand designs. Once the laughter has stopped, then it’s time for the tears.
Tim Pnin’s Origins and Ancestors
Let’s begin with Pnin. Pnin is a Russian from a good family of minor nobility, not that that matters when bombs start flying in Saint Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. He escapes to Europe, his family die, and when Hitler gains power and starts using it Pnin makes the journey to America, where his Russian wife (but met in Europe) leaves him almost at once. There, with the help of old-world knowledge and the network of fellow intelligent Russians that soon formed in the United States, Pnin ends up at Waindell College, a small university in a small university town, and settles down to teach and become a real American.
We first meet him on the train, because his life is one of movement, often involuntary. And we meet him on the wrong train because he is a fool. He has used a timetable that is five years out of date. In this moment the problem that is doomed to plague Pnin for the whole book is made clear – he is out of touch, and doesn’t seem to know it. As a result of all this, and his poor English and worse social skills, he becomes a comic figure in the vein of Gogol’s civil servants and Chekhov’s banal mediocrities. He struggles with teaching and academic intrigues, with finding places to stay, and even with driving. And wherever he goes and whatever he does, somehow memories of the past he has lost find a way of returning to him, for better or for worse.
Poor Pnin – Sympathy and Comedy
It is perhaps as a teacher that Pnin is at his most comedic. He is not the proud leader of a Russian department but rather slotted in, through academic jiu-jitsu, as part of the German Department in some kind of comparative role, and he has only a few students at the best of times. He is not a good teacher, by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of those who we tend to look back on fondly. I know that I remember the teachers with heart and humour far better than I do the cold, bespectacled men who got me to Cambridge and then vanished into an almost-robotic silence in my memory. Pnin not like them – he is a fun teacher, beloved for “those unforgettable digressions of his”, and “what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humour”.
Against his pupils, brimming with ignorance and at best a secondhand passion for such books as Anna Karamazov, Pnin espouses in broken English the love that he cannot truly hope to translate, and fails dramatically at teaching anything akin to grammar or vocabulary. Poor Pnin at first veers uncomfortably between being the permanent butt of a joke and someone we can at least extend some sympathy to, but by the end of the book he has managed to acquire a sort of heroic dignity. Not that that stops him from regularly falling downstairs, mistaking one professor for another, and various other mishaps.
Pnin and his novel seem to bring over to American literature that very Russian mood of “smekh skvoz’ slyozi”, or “laughter through tears”, where comedy can at any moment transform into the deepest sadness and pity.
One example of this is Pnin’s purchase of a football for the son of his ex-wife and her second husband. Viktor is coming to stay with Pnin at his ex-wife’s behest. At first the whole idea is comic – Pnin goes to the store, has some difficulty with the American conception of “football” (“No, no,” said Pnin, “I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!”), but eventually gets the soccer ball he wants to give out of kindness alone. Yet when Viktor actually arrives, he reveals, unwittingly, that he doesn’t like sport, and Pnin’s mood is as deflated just as much as any ball could be, and he throws the ball out of the window when Viktor isn’t looking. The final scene of the chapter has the ball rolling through a windy night, alone and prey to the elements. Poor Pnin.
History’s Pnin-pong Ball
But all this pain is most in evidence whenever the novel deals with the theme of history itself and its effects upon the individuals who get in its way. I noticed that each chapter begins, more or less, with comedy, but ends with bleak rumination and the lonely exploration of Pnin’s memories. Pnin and his fellow Russian nobles left Russia under threat of death, and tried, some with success, some without, to establish themselves in Europe, and then when that dream failed due to Nazism, they headed West once again, to America. Some died in the struggle. Pnin’s first love was among those who were put to death in the concentration camps – she was a person who through the lens of memory becomes a symbol of a more innocent time, of peace and honesty as opposed to the serial adultery of his actual wife.
One recounted memory that I remember particularly strongly is of Pnin, the girl, and a few other young Russians putting on a play in an aristocratic estate in one of the Baltic parts of the Russian Empire. We don’t see the play in any great detail, but the image of its performance is a strong one. For those Russians, in the period of their youth before the Revolutions came, life was merely a game, a play, with no true conflict and no chance that history might turn against them and scatter them like leaves in the wind. Of course, their attitude towards life is not something to be applauded, but the tragedy that took place is something that within the context of their own lives ought to be lamented. Their peace turned out to be only a dream, and they were ill-prepared for the reality.
What I liked was that Nabokov doesn’t stop with just criticising the Soviets and the Germans, the low-hanging fruit of the Second World War. He also suggests, with ever more urgency as the book goes on, that McCarthyism in America is another such dangerous and hateful trend. Pnin’s unpopularity as a teacher is, yes, partially due to the fact that he can’t exactly teach, but it’s also increasingly due to a cultural shift that sees everything “Russian” as being “commie” and dangerous. Even though he has escaped to America, Pnin can’t escape the hands of fools who wish to turn ordinary people’s lives into tools for political games. We as readers can only hope that he and the other Russians escape the worst years of American repressions intact.
Language in Pnin
Nabokov is a master wordsmith – everybody knows as much – but Nabokov’s language in Pnin is also, surprisingly perhaps, another place where sympathy can be located. Pnin is introduced as something of a fool when he speaks, spouting Russianisms and using idioms wrongly. At first we laugh, because such moments are indeed very funny. When he discovers that he is on the wrong train at the novel’s beginning we hear: ““Important lecture!” cried Pnin. “What to do? It is a catastroph!”” Having spent a lot of time among Russians with varying levels of English, I find Nabokov’s portrayal leaves nothing to be desired. As the novel goes on, Pnin’s English continues to be serviceable but broken, Russified, and occasionally plain wrong. We laugh and continue to think of Pnin as an affable old fool, as out of touch linguistically as he is culturally.
But then, when Pnin is at a retreat for fellow Russians in the American countryside, Nabokov takes his foot off the breaks and Pnin begins to speak. He does not lurch in broken sentences, but words – intelligent, reasonable, words – flow warmly from his mouth. And suddenly we realise that the fool we thought we saw, the bumbler who can scarcely speak, is not the real Pnin, but just the shadow that he is capable of translating. And we feel sad for him, so often isolated from his true self. He talks of beauty and of literature with wit and character, and we can only wish that his English were good enough to get the words out at other times – for his students’ sakes, at the very least.
Another moment that truly humanises poor old Pnin comes at the very end of the novel, when the narrator is relating Pnin’s courtship of his future ex-wife, an artistic young poet who is a member of fashionable social circles where Pnin would never end up in a million years. And yet Pnin writes her a letter where he bares his soul and asks for her hand. We see Pnin as he really is, not barred by language or custom – we see him free and in love. “I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything… I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy”. The language is poetic, the sentiment heroic. This is the true Pnin.
Conclusion
Nabokov is famous for his formal trickery, unreliable narrators, and gameplaying, and in Pnin this is not limited to bad puns alone. The book ends with one of those classic reversals of postmodern ingenuity that no doubt will leave an eventual rereading of the book all the richer by undermining a lot of the narrative that has gone before. In other words, the ending does cheapen the rest of the book, no matter how much it does give you things to think about. To each their own, but personally I’m content just to enjoy the rest of the book without overthinking the implications of the closing pages. A second time through, no doubt, I’ll see everything a little differently. But for now, I’ll save myself the trouble.
Pnin is a short book, which makes it easy to recommend. However masterful its prose, I enjoy how much attention poor Professor Pnin receives. Like him, the book is funny and a little twee. But also like him, underneath the bumbling exterior there lurk depths that are worth looking into, and reveal a sadness and isolation that lend Pnin’s story a tragic note. Alongside the laughs there are also the tears that come from an understanding of another’s suffering, a suffering that until we have taken a trip through Pnin’s world may well have been completely unknown to us. The book summons up sympathy, and that’s a very valuable thing, especially in our modern world, where history continues daily creating playthings of individual lives. Perhaps you have already met your Pnin – perhaps your meeting is still to come. But now, at least, you’ll be ready for him.
For my rather more lukewarm response to Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, follow this link.