‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov: Satire with sadness

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One day when I was very young, my father extracted from some hidden recess of our basement a stack of paperback books. Though still years away from puberty, I could tell some were a bit louche, both from the luridness of the covers and the way my father was trying to shoo me away from them.

By the priggish standards of Catholic-dominated mid-century Buffalo, such authors as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and James T. Farrell were considered virtual pornographers. Canny publishers stoked their bad reputations by plastering racy covers onto paperback editions of such novels as Faulkner’s Pylon, Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre and Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, all of which turned up in my house when I was a child. Due to such efforts, heterosexual males of the Mad Men era in search of a prurient tingle or two were probably exposed against their will to some pretty good American literature.

The cover I remember best among my father’s covert collection was that of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. It caught my eye both with its odd title and its vivid illustration of three saucy young women eyed from afar by a little bald man. So distinctly did I recollect it that it took me less than a minute to find it online. A blurb above the title evokes the most notoriously naughty novel of the era, Nabokov’s Lolita.

Though the cover is technically not inaccurate, it is highly selective: Only late in the book comes one brief reference to “Pnin ogling a coed.” That is buried deep inside a

wicked (but not very sexy) Horatian satire of academia (specifically Cornell, where Nabokov taught) as well as a poignantly comic portrait of Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, a gentle, scholarly Russian expatriate haunted by memories of his lost homeland and lost loves, rendered in exquisite if often idiosyncratic prose.

My father must have been quite disappointed. More than half a century later, I am not.

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