One of his five must-reads by--and about--the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, from Shrayer's 2010 dialogue with Anna Blundy at The Browser:PninRead about another entry on the list.
by Vladimir Nabokov
Now, Pnin.
I deliberately chose Glory over The Gift, but I have to get the American years in. There is Lolita in the back of everybody’s mind, of course, and 95 per cent of the students who take my undergraduate course are doing it because of Lolita. But I’m choosing Pnin instead for two reasons. Firstly, Lolita looms so large that I don’t have to choose it, but, secondly, because Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov’s American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin’s beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker, so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised.
Is it autobiographical?
Slightly. Not in any direct way, but insofar as Pnin is a Russian intellectual in America in the post-war period, and also in the main character’s connection with a female Jewish identity. Nabokov’s wife, Véra Nabokov (born Slonim), was Jewish. So, yes,Nabokov is mulling over themes he mulled over throughout his life – here he does not reference his life so much as his thinking. Pnin is a novel about Holocaust memory and the kinds of things that other European émigré intellectuals – Adorno, Arendt – were thinking about at the time. Yet Nabokov creates a perfect work of art, a work that succeeds on aesthetic grounds but does not distract the reader from the various political, intellectual and philosophical battles of his novel.
Pnin has survivor’s guilt, though he is not guilty. He keeps seeing and imagining how Mira died in Buchenwald. Then Pnin doesn’t get the tenure he was after, at which point Nabokov pulls a trick that he pulls again and again – putting himself into the story. A great Russian émigré called ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’ arrives to take over, in the way he may well have done at Cornell in reality, and he offers Pnin the chance to stay on. Pnin doesn’t want to exist in a world where the authorial presence is so close and so in charge, so Nabokov releases Pnin. Pnin departs, but his legend lives on. Nabokov ends his novel with Pnin’s disappearance and also with a joke that takes us back to the beginning.
Pnin also appears on Matthew Kaminski's list of his five favorite novels about immigrants in America and John Mullan's list of ten of the best breakages in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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