Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov / ISBN 9780241638422 / 176-page book published in 2024 in the Penguin Clothbound Classics series

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Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.

Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.

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. He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland.