Nabokov's Pnin

About Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a Russian-born American novelist, lepidopterist, and chess problemist who wrote in Russian, French, and English and is widely considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Born into a wealthy St. Petersburg family, he fled Russia after the Revolution, studied at Trinity College Cambridge, and lived successively in Berlin and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1940. His English-language masterworks include The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), Pnin (1957), Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada, or Ardor (1969). Pnin is the most accessible and emotionally direct of his English novels — a tender portrait of a Russian émigré professor in American academe — while Lolita and Pale Fire represent his formal range. He also translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin into English with a four-volume commentary, and his memoir Speak, Memory (1951) is among the finest autobiographies in the language. He taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1958 and spent the rest of his life at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland.