Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 6th December 2000
Hardback
Published: 2nd July 2024
Hardback
Published: 15th March 2004
Pnin
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
2nd July 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Humorous fiction
Narrative theme: Displacement, exile, migration
Narrative theme: Identity / belonging
Higher education, tertiary education
FIC
Hardback
176
Width 138mm, Height 204mm, Spine 21mm
288g
Hilarious, intelligent and moving, Pnin is the tale of a generation irrevocably severed from its past 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.
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.