Pnin Introduction by David Lodge

<b>One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, <i>Pnin</i> features his funniest and most heart-rending character.  Serialized in <i>The New Yorker</i> and published in book form in 1957, <i>Pnin</i> brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.<br><br>“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.” —<i>Chicago Tribune</i><br><br></b>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.<br><br>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.