Pnin: Introduction by David Lodge (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Buch 16 von 37: Harry Palmer

Nabokov, Vladimir

 
9781400041985: Pnin: Introduction by David Lodge (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400041988 ISBN 13: 9781400041985
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character.  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.

“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune

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 misunder-standings, 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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 emigre 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.

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INTRODUCTION by David Lodge
 
Vladimir Nabokov was a literary genius. There is no other word with which to describe a writer who in mid-life became a stylistic virtuoso in a language that was not his mother tongue. Circumstances – which is to say, the convulsions of twentieth century European politics – impelled him to achieve this feat, exchanging Russian for English as the medium of his art (as well as acquiring an enviable fluency in French along the way). He was born, in 1899, into a patrician Russian family who were driven into exile by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. After studying at Cambridge University in England, he scraped a living as a writer in Berlin, and later in Paris, publishing novels in Russian (some of which were translated variously into English, German and French) without making any great impression on the literary world. He came to America in 1940, with his Jewish wife, Vera, and their son, Dmitri, as virtually penniless refugees from Nazi-occupied France. In spite of lacking conventional academic credentials, Nabokov was able to find employment as a university teacher of Russian and comparative literature, first at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and from 1948 at Cornell University in upstate New York. Over the same period he began to rebuild his career as a writer of fiction. His first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) had the misfortune to appear only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was barely noticed. But his essays and stories attracted the attention and admiration of editors and fellow writers, and in 1944 The New Yorker, which at this time enjoyed a uniquely prestigious position in the American literary world, acquired the right to first consideration of his work. His second novel in English was, however, only a little more successful than its predecessor. This was Bend Sinister (1947) a dark fable about an imaginary (but obviously European) state under brutal totalitarian rule.
 
Over the next few years Nabokov, in the intervals allowed by his teaching duties and other literary and scholarly projects, began to work on a novel set for the first time in America, based on an unpublished pre-war short story with a European setting about a man sexually attracted to prepubescent girls. Lolita grew in scale and complexity and caused him much labour and anxiety. In the summer of 1953, when (on sabbatical leave from Cornell) he was at last drawing towards the end of this novel, Nabokov wrote a short story called ‘Pnin’, about the comical misadventures of an expatriate Russian professor on his way to deliver a lecture to a Women’s Club in a small American town. He created the new character partly as a relief from the dark obsessive world of Humbert Humbert – in his own words (in a letter to a friend) as a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. But it is clear that the new project was also a kind of insurance against the difficulties that he expected to encounter in trying to publish a novel in which a middle-aged man describes in lavish and eloquent detail his infatuation with and seduction of a twelve-year-old girl. From an early stage in the development of the character of Pnin he planned to write a series of stories about him which could be published independently in The New Yorker, and later strung together to make a book, thus ensuring some continuity of publication and income while he tried to find a publisher for Lolita. This proved to be a shrewd professional strategy. It also partly explains the unusual form of Pnin.
 
Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? Critics have disagreed about the answer to this question, and some have grumbled that it is neither one thing nor the other – arguing that the chapters are too slight either to satisfy as individual stories or to add up to a proper novel. In fact the stories are artfully well-formed, and reward close and careful reading. What seems like a random detail often turns out to be a narrative clue, the full significance of which only becomes evident later. The repetition of motifs also gives the stories a satisfying symmetry, individually and collectively. Chapter Two, for instance, begins with the sound of the bells of Waindell College, and ends with a picture of the bells on a magazine cover. Chapter Four begins and ends with descriptions of rain falling while the characters sleep, or fail to sleep. Squirrels pop up in one form or another in nearly every story, as do reflections in windows, puddles and mirrors. In spite of the temporal gaps between them, the stories describe a continuous narrative arc, poignantly tracing Pnin’s quest, which is ultimately frustrated, to find a home, or to make himself ‘at home’ in alien Waindell. To point out these formal features, however, does not quite meet the challenge of defining exactly what kind of fictional work Pnin is.
 
If we need a generic provenance for Pnin, we might trace it back to the character-sketches of representative ‘types’ written by the classical Greek author Theophrastus and his later imitators. Although the narrator assures us that ‘Pnin . . . was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor’, there is something of the stock ‘absent-minded professor’ in his character. That ‘Pnin’ is the only genuine name in the Russian language consisting of just one syllable, however, emphasizes the character’s rich individuality rather than his typicality. In the text his name takes on a linguistic life of its own, becoming an adjective (he is in a ‘Pninian quandary’ in the first story), a verb (he ‘Pninizes’ his office by his choice of furniture and fittings) and an incitement to word-play both intentional (‘Ping-pong, Pnin?’) and unintentional, as when the chairwoman of his lecture at Cremona introduces him as ‘Professor Pun-neen’. Considered as a novel, Pnin is certainly a prime example of what the Chicago Aristotelian critics called ‘the novel of character’ (as distinct from the novel of plot or the novel of ideas). The very title indicates that its aim is to evoke a person rather than to tell a story – or to evoke a person by telling a series of anecdotes about him. When Nabokov was looking for a publisher for the completed book he stressed the element of character:
 
"In Pnin I have created an entirely new character, the like of which has never appeared in any other book. A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity. But handicapped and hemmed in by his incapability to learn a language, he seems a figure of fun to many an average intellectual..." 
 
Nabokov was not always so admiring of his creation. Sending the first story, ‘Pnin’, to his editor at The New Yorker, Katharine White, he wrote in a covering letter, ‘he is not a very nice person but he is fun’. The stance of author to character implied in the work itself comes somewhere between these two extremes, and is complicated by the ambiguous relationship (to be discussed later) between the narrator and Vladimir Nabokov. The Pnin that emerges from the whole sequence of stories is certainly an engaging character, in whose fortunes (mainly misfortunes) we take a sympathetic interest. We approve of the characters who befriend him and disapprove of those who exploit him. But he is an essentially comic character – pathetic at times, to be sure, but not a tragic hero. His physical appearance...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400041988
ISBN 13 
9781400041985
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
184
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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