Pnin

Name: Pnin
ISBN: 9787532762477

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov / 梅绍武Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaJun 2015

4.5

Word count: 203K words
Chapters: 61
ISBN: 9787532762477

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Summary

Pnin is Nabokov's most autobiographical comic classic. First serialized in four installments in The New Yorker between 1953 and 1957, it was the first of Nabokov's novels to attract wide attention and win the welcome of American readers. It portrays the life of an elderly Russian professor in exile teaching at an American college. Nabokov skillfully blends Russian culture with modern American civilization, humorously and wittily depicting a troubled man who has lost his homeland, severed his ties with the culture of his native land, and lost love as well.

Editor's review

Pnin is Nabokov's first novel written in English. With his signature precision and deep compassion, it carves out an enduring fable of fate and memory from the folds of an exile's daily life. Far from a simple narrative of immigrant sorrow, the novel uses the small, poetic existence of Professor Pnin—a Russian scholar teaching at Waindell College, doubly exiled from his native language and homeland—to explore how language constructs identity and how memory distorts truth. From a perspective that seems detached yet is in fact full of warmth, Nabokov weaves Pnin's clumsiness, perseverance, and loneliness into a delicate tapestry of loss and dignity. What pervades the book is a restrained irony and a profound sadness; the lightly sketched satire of academic life interweaves with dreamlike recollections of a vanished Russian past to create a distinctive tension. Reading Pnin is to experience how Nabokov fuses linguistic playfulness, structural precision, and ultimate concern for the human condition. It offers no cheap consolation, yet through incomparable literary craft it lets readers, between a smile and a broken heart, glimpse the individual's existence—at once small and dignified—shining in the flood of history.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in Nabokov's literary world who wish to understand the starting point of his English-language writing
Literary lovers who prefer delicate psychological portraiture and finely wrought detail, and who relish the inner tension of prose
Thinkers eager to explore themes of migration, displacement, identity, and cultural memory in depth
Readers who appreciate a complex narrative style that blends humor, irony, and profound compassion

Not a good fit for

Readers of popular fiction who seek strong plotting, fast pacing, and dramatic conflict
Readers who engage with literature only at the level of surface plot and are unwilling to delve into textual texture and layers of metaphor

Reading tips

Read at a slower pace and pay attention to Nabokov's poetic capture of everyday detail and his subtle irony; these are often the key to understanding the characters and themes
Note the discussions of language (Russian and English) and the way memory scenes are presented; they are important paths into Pnin's inner world
After finishing the novel, consider the universality of the character Pnin: he transcends the specific identity of exile and becomes a symbol of a certain human condition

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

版权信息
作者简介
第一章
一
二
三
第二章
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
第三章
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
第四章
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
八
九
第五章
一
二
三
四
五
第六章
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
八
九
一〇
一一
一二
一三
第七章
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
译者的话

FAQ

Where does Pnin stand in Nabokov's career?

Pnin is Nabokov's first novel after switching from Russian to English, an important transitional work. It continues the concern with exile and the exquisite style of his earlier Russian works while opening the way to the more complex narrative experiments and wordplay of his later English masterpieces (such as Lolita and Pale Fire). It is a milestone of his mature literary craft.

How do humor and sorrow coexist in the novel?

Nabokov excels at depicting Professor Pnin's predicaments (his misunderstandings of American customs, his failure to fit into the college) with an elegant, slightly detached humor. This humor is not mockery but a cloak wrapped around deep sympathy. It is precisely in these smile-inducing details that Pnin's eternal loneliness and sense of loss—rooted in the past and suspended in the present—are thrown into ever sharper relief, producing the complex aesthetic effect of a smile with tears.

How should we understand the character Pnin? Is he merely a pitiable exile?

Pnin is far more than a sympathetic symbol of exile. Behind his clumsiness lies a stubborn adherence to old cultural and moral standards; his nostalgia is not weakness but a way of using personal memory to resist historical erasure and assimilation. Nabokov endows him with dignity and inner richness, making him a tragic hero striving to maintain his own coherence in a broken world; his image carries a universal question about how to preserve inner freedom and human integrity.

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About the author

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Author · Russian-American · 1899–1977

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist, poet, translator, and lepidopterist. Born in 1899 into a noble family in St. Petersburg, he went into exile in Europe in 1919, later graduated from Cambridge University, became a U.S. citizen in 1945, and taught at Cornell University; he died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. His work spans novels, short stories, essays, and literary criticism, with major titles including Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin, and Speak, Memory. His prose is intricate and ornate, marked by irony, wordplay, and unreliable narration, and has deeply influenced modern fictional technique; annotated and guided editions of Lolita and his correspondence collections attest to the continued reach of his work in the Chinese-speaking world.

梅绍武 Author

Public information about Mei Shaowu is limited. The existing records show twelve works listed under this name, spanning categories such as mystery and detective fiction, foreign literature, folk literature, and film and television. Judging from the representative titles, he helped introduce several foreign plays and novels to Chinese readers: Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and The American Clock, as well as Nabokov's Pnin and related collections. These titles suggest that his work centered on bringing English-language drama and narrative literature to a Chinese readership; Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories in English and Chinese also serves bilingual reading and the popularization of detective fiction. Since his dates of birth and death, nationality, and personal history cannot be verified, no inferences are made here; his profile as a translator and editor rests solely on these compiled and translated works.