Word: pnin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller's Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift-which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night...
...PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. About an émigré Russian professor at a U.S. college whose joyously ridiculous English and congenital helplessness only faintly conceal the sorrow of exile...
Most of the time bald, myopic, barrel-chested, spindly-legged Pnin wrestles mirthfully with his fate even though he loses most of the falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture...
...Unlike Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov learned English at his English governess' knee. His family belonged to the landed Russian aristocracy, but his liberal-minded father gave up his position at the Tsar's court, sardonically advertised his court uniform for sale, later was assassinated by Russian monarchists. As a refugee from the Revolution, Vladimir worked for a Cambridge degree, lived in France and Germany, wrote eight novels in Russian...
...Nabokov is in the strange position of a man whose career is leading a double life, for the most remarkable demonstration of his fictional powers is a novel virtually unknown in the U.S. or abroad. As dark and demoniac as Pnin is gentle and sunlit, this novel has in the past year become a sotto voce scandal on two continents. Lolita, published in English by France's Olympia Press, gives the pornography-v.-art debate its most combustible tinder since Judge Woolsey handed down his famed decision on Ulysses...