Word: pnin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PNIN (191 pp.) -Vladimir Nabokov-Doubleday...
...Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather...
Novelist Vladimir (Bend Sinister) Nabokov, 57, himself an émigré Russian and a Cornell professor of Russian literature, does more than sound-track his hero for laughs; in unobtrusive flashbacks he captures the underlying pathos of exile. Leafing through an émigré journal, Pnin sees his dead father and mother in the lamplit serenity of their pre-Revolutionary home; stonily viewing a Soviet documentary film, he bursts into tears at a sudden glimpse of the Russian countryside in springtime...