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Pnin
  • Published: 15 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9781857152722
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $35.00

Pnin

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Dec 2000
Hardback
2 July 2024
EBook
21 Nov 2012
Hardback
15 Mar 2004
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, PNIN features his funniest and most heartrending character. Professor 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 misunderstandings, 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 reader's deepest protective instinct.

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.
  • Published: 15 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9781857152722
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the author

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

VN

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Praise for Pnin

Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike

John Updike
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