Pnin

Nabokov’s Pnin is only a very short book – ideal reading for a rainy, cheerless day…and I would recommend it to anyone, because bringing about smiles of both laughter and wistfulness is a sure sign of success.

Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!

Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.

A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.

Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.