Pnin: Introduction by David Lodge by Vladimir Nabokov (English) Hardcover Book

Description: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, David Lodge The National Book Award-nominated classic finds hapless Russian emigre Timofey Pnin precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s, where he falls victim to subtle academic conspiracies and the manipulations of the narrator. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description One of the best-loved of Nabokovs 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 TribuneProfessor 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 readers deepest protective instinct. Author Biography Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybodys concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokovs American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. Review "Hilariously funny and of a sadness." –Graham Greene"Pnins 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 Review Quote "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpt from Book 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 The New Yorker , which at this time enjoyed a uniquely prestigious position in the American literary world, acquired the right to first consideration of his work. His second novel in English was, however, only a little more successful than its predecessor. This was Bend Sinister (1947) a dark fable about an imaginary (but obviously European) state under brutal totalitarian rule. Over the next few years Nabokov, in the intervals allowed by his teaching duties and other literary and scholarly projects, began to work on a novel set for the first time in America, based on an unpublished pre-war short story with a European setting about a man sexually attracted to prepubescent girls. Lolita grew in scale and complexity and caused him much labour and anxiety. In the summer of 1953, when (on sabbatical leave from Cornell) he was at last drawing towards the end of this novel, Nabokov wrote a short story called Pnin, about the comical misadventures of an expatriate Russian professor on his way to deliver a lecture to a Womens Club in a small American town. He created the new character partly as a relief from the dark obsessive world of Humbert Humbert - in his own words (in a letter to a friend) as a brief sunny escape from [ Lolita s] intolerable spell. But it is clear that the new project was also a kind of insurance against the difficulties that he expected to encounter in trying to publish a novel in which a middle-aged man describes in lavish and eloquent detail his infatuation with and seduction of a twelve-year-old girl. From an early stage in the development of the character of Pnin he planned to write a series of stories about him which could be published independently in The New Yorker , and later strung together to make a book, thus ensuring some continuity of publication and income while he tried to find a publisher for Lolita . This proved to be a shrewd professional strategy. It also partly explains the unusual form of Pnin . Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? Critics have disagreed about the answer to this question, and some have grumbled that it is neither one thing nor the other - arguing that the chapters are too slight either to satisfy as individual stories or to add up to a proper novel. In fact the stories are artfully well-formed, and reward close and careful reading. What seems like a random detail often turns out to be a narrative clue, the full significance of which only becomes evident later. The repetition of motifs also gives the stories a satisfying symmetry, individually and collectively. Chapter Two, for instance, begins with the sound of the bells of Waindell College, and ends with a picture of the bells on a magazine cover. Chapter Four begins and ends with descriptions of rain falling while the characters sleep, or fail to sleep. Squirrels pop up in one form or another in nearly every story, as do reflections in windows, puddles and mirrors. In spite of the temporal gaps between them, the stories describe a continuous narrative arc, poignantly tracing Pnins quest, which is ultimately frustrated, to find a home, or to make himself at home in alien Waindell. To point out these formal features, however, does not quite meet the challenge of defining exactly what kind of fictional work Pnin is. If we need a generic provenance for Pnin , we might trace it back to the character-sketches of representative types written by the classical Greek author Theophrastus and his later imitators. Although the narrator assures us that Pnin . . . was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor , there is something of the stock absent-minded professor in his character. That Pnin is the only genuine name in the Russian language consisting of just one syllable, however, emphasizes the characters rich individuality rather than his typicality. In the text his name takes on a linguistic life of its own, becoming an adjective (he is in a Pninian quandary in the first story), a verb (he Pninizes his office by his choice of furniture and fittings) and an incitement to word-play both intentional (Ping-pong, Pnin?) and unintentional, as when the chairwoman of his lecture at Cremona introduces him as Professor Pun-neen. Considered as a novel, Pnin is certainly a prime example of what the Chicago Aristotelian critics called the novel of character (as distinct from the novel of plot or the novel of ideas). The very title indicates that its aim is to evoke a person rather than to tell a story - or to evoke a person by telling a series of anecdotes about him. When Nabokov was looking for a publisher for the completed book he stressed the element of character: "In Pnin I have created an entirely new character, the like of which has never appeared in any other book. A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity. But handicapped and hemmed in by his incapability to learn a language, he seems a figure of fun to many an average intellectual..." Nabokov was not always so admiring of his creation. Sending the first story, Pnin, to his editor at The New Yorker , Katharine White, he wrote in a covering letter, he is not a very nice person but he is fun. The stance of author to character implied in the work itself comes somewhere between these two extremes, and is complicated by the ambiguous relationship (to be discussed later) between the narrator and Vladimir Nabokov. The Pnin that emerges from the whole sequence of stories is certainly an engaging character, in whose fortunes (mainly misfortunes) we take a sympathetic interest. We approve of the characters who befriend him and disapprove of those who exploit him. But he is an essentially comic character - pathetic at times, to be sure, but not a tragic hero. His physical appearance - the impressive combination of head, shoulders and torso that tapers off disappointingly in a pair of spindly legs . . . and frail-looking, almost feminine feet - is an anatomical anticlimax, an emblem of the kind of situation he is constantly getting himself into by some error of understanding or judgement. Pnin inhabits a Pninian world, but unfortunately nobody else does, and he is constantly bumping into uncomfortable or embarrassing evidence of this fact. Bathos is also a recurrent rhetorical trope in the stylistic surface of the book. Where did this character come from? There have been several suggestions for real-life models, the most plausible being the historian Marc Szeftel, an emigre Russian historian who was a colleague of Nabokovs at Cornell (which is recognizable as Waindell College in Pnin , according to those who know both the actual and the fictional campus). Galya Diment has collected and displayed the evidence for this identification in her Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (1997). By collating the New Yorke r texts of the Pnin stories with their eventual form in the published book, she shows that Nabokov revised some of the biographical facts of Pnins life, making them correspond more closely to Szeftels curriculum vitae, and suggests that this process was connected with a perceptible warming of the authors attitude to his character as the book progressed (for which there is some warrant in the two contrasting descriptions by Nabokov quoted above). Diment believes that the humanized Pnin is, in many ways, the Szeftelized Pnin. It is certainly significant that Szeftel was Jewish, because it is Pnins association with his Jewish sweetheart Mira, and his anguish at her tragic fate (revealed in Chapter Five) that dignifies his character more than any other single trait. But there were other things Pnin apparently had in common with Szeftel, such as his imperfect English, which would have seemed less flattering to the putative model. It is fairly obvious that Pnin was not an instantly recognizable portrait or caricature o Details ISBN1400041988 Author David Lodge Short Title PNIN Language English ISBN-10 1400041988 ISBN-13 9781400041985 Media Book Format Hardcover DEWEY 813.54 Year 2004 Imprint Everymans Library USA Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Residence St. Petersburg, RUR Birth 1899 Death 1977 DOI 10.1604/9781400041985 AU Release Date 2004-04-06 NZ Release Date 2004-04-06 US Release Date 2004-04-06 UK Release Date 2004-04-06 Subtitle Introduction by David Lodge Pages 184 Publisher Random House USA Inc Series Everymans Library Contemporary Classics Series Publication Date 2004-04-06 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:138238654;

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