Word: pnin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Vladimir, acquaintances remember, was handsome, courtly, occasionally terribly amusing at parties. It was not for Nabokov, though, to commit the hilarious gaffes of his comic creation, the emigre Professor Timofey Pnin. Years of having to conform with dignity as an outsider had marked his manner. Mrs. Yvor Winters, widow of the critic, recalls that Nabokov would never kiss a woman's hand, as many other refugees did. "If I were in Russia," he once confided to her, "I would kiss your hand...
Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight...
...Nakobov is best when his characters bear the same watermark as himself. Some of his "made-up" characters are good, but they cannot compare to the boy in "First Love," the aging lover in "Spring in Fialta," Pnin, or Humbert Humbert of Lolita, all of whom clearly resemble the author. Lolita, that beautiful and hilarious love story, is still his greatest novel...
...What would happen if I put in a long-distance call from my desk right now? No answer? No such number? No such country?" Highest Rank. No such country. The present has deservedly rewarded Nabokov, now 67, whose novels in English-The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire-have placed him in the highest rank of contemporary writers. These books stimulated a demand for the au thor's total work, so that most of his earlier Russian novels have now completed the journey into translation...
...Revolution. Ever since then he has quietly taken refuge in an elegant, ironic domain of private jokes and personal fantasies. Lolita made him famous because the private joke was also a public one that millions found appalling or appealing. His other works (The Eye, Pale Fire, Pnin, etc.) have been more complex fantasies. One of them is this prophetic, satirical play, written in 1938 and now gracefully translated from the Russian by Author Nabokov and his son Dmitri. The reader can scarcely imagine its being successfully performed, but its characteristically savage humor and verbal inventiveness will be earnestly devoured...