Nabokov’s Pnin: Exile and Loss

While studying English at Berkeley I shared a flat with a Florentine count who had the same “disarming, old-fashioned charm” as Nabokov’s sad and comic fictional hero Pnin. Exactly the age of my mother, the bald and homely Carlo was expert in slow motion, a living example of how not to succeed in graduate school. He could take half an hour to smooth his favorite Hero jam on his toast, a full hour to look up a perplexing word in a dictionary. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was too heavy to lift, too long to read. Carlo, an ineffective teacher, never finished, scarcely even started, his Ph.D. But he finally convinced a gullible college in upstate New York that his undergraduate Dottore in Lettere degree was equivalent to an American doctorate and got his first job the year before he became emeritus. At the end of his first semester a puzzled student wrote in one of his class evaluations, “Is this guy for real?” “Chafe,” he called me, mildly protesting in his heavily accented English, “I am real!”

For all his weaknesses, Carlo was utterly charming and lovable. A Proustian figure of exquisite sensibility and taste, he had delightful diction and manners, Old World elegance and refinement. He cultivated a certain remoteness and detachment; and refused, indeed was unable, to adapt to American ways and strive for achievement and success. A neurasthenic and hypochondriac, he carefully cultivated a life of idleness. Living with Carlo was constant exposure to European customs and culture. A highly civilized man and uprooted remnant of a vanishing way of life, Carlo helped me to understand the decadent aristocratic society depicted in one of my favorite novels, Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

In the contemporary academic novel, like Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954), American writers caustically satiriSe their students and colleagues. In Pnin (1957) Nabokov gently satirises his own mild and unworldly exile, who has lost almost everything and will lose even more. A new kind of exile, the professorial Pnin is also very different from the violent anti-czarist revolutionaries in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911).

Pnin begins on a train, like an early chapter of Anna Karenina, with the professor on his way to give a lecture to a ladies’ club. The anti-hero has an apish upper lip, spindly legs and feminine feet. His youthful offer of marriage to the unworthy Liza is, like Kafka’s proposals to Felice Bauer, self-punishing and self-defeating: “I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Liza, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything” — though more tears will flow.

He’s fluent in his native Russian and in French, and has learned German and Czech at Charles University in Prague in the early 1920s, but his broken English and verbal vagaries are mocked by his colleagues in Waindell College (which seems to be based on Wellesley). Though Nabokov criticises Charlie Chaplin in the novel, Pnin endures a series of Chaplinesque mishaps. His name sounds like “pain” and “panic,” and he firmly believes “the history of man is the history of pain!” A stranger in a strange land, he is isolated and lonely amid colleagues with whom he has very little in common.

His curriculum vitae, a series of disasters, provides essential information: “Born in St. Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Was with [Denikin’s] White Army five months, first as a ‘field telephonist,’ then at the Military Information Office. Escaped from Red-invaded Crimea to Constantinople in 1919… Habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France at beginning of Hitler war. Is now here. American citizen.” Pnin has published several articles on Russia, and contemplated but never wrote a Petite Histoire of Russian culture.

The self-deluding Pnin thinks that if modern history had been completely different, his life, paradoxically, would have been much the same: “had there been no Russian Revolution, no exodus, no expatriation in France, no naturalisation in America,” he would have taken up a professorship in Kharkov in the Ukraine or Kazan (Tolstoy’s university) on the Volga. Yet he is also well aware of the atrocities of modern history and even plans a doomed course on tyranny: on the Boot, a torture instrument; on similar torments invented in Tibet; on the cruel Czar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55); and on the Turkish massacres of Armenians in World War I.

A humane man, Pnin cultivates a sympathy with failure on the sad campus. He feeds a mangy dog, and offers drink to a squirrel at a water fountain while a hunter kills small forest animals. His character shines out in his unending and humiliating devotion to his treacherous ex-wife, “with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul.” Her fat feet contrast to Pnin’s feminine feet. Liza betrays him with Dr. Eric Wind, pretends to return to him when she’s seven months pregnant, uses their wretched but still valid marriage to smuggle Wind aboard their ship to America and finally persuades Pnin to pay for her son’s prep school education.

Pnin is the opposite of Nabokov in almost every way. Nabokov came from a fabulously wealthy and politically prominent family. He was tall, handsome, athletic and since childhood was perfectly trilingual in Russian, French and English. Greatly admired as a novelist and a keenly observant expert on butterflies, he was happily married and had a successful academic career.

But they also have some important things in common. Both Nabokov and Pnin escaped from Russia through the Crimea, traveled on Nansen passports and left Paris for New York in 1940. Permanently homeless in America, they frequently move from place to place, and acquire a new set of alabastrine dentures. Since English words not only suggest meaning but also similar sounds to foreigners, both men — like Shakespeare, Swift and Joyce — are inordinately fond of puns, including “Bachelor of Hearts”. Nabokov’s son Dmitri and Pnin’s foster-son Victor Wind are both unusually tall and talented. Nabokov tries to interest himself in Dmitri’s car racing and opera singing; Pnin mistakenly thinks Victor is interested in soccer and the adventure novels of Jack London.

Pnin believes that the souls of the dead influence the destinies of the living. In the most poignant and agonising passage in the novel, Pnin combines romantic memories of his youthful love for a girl named Mira, after their engagement has been broken by history, with tragic accounts of all the ways she might have been murdered in Buchenwald, near the cultural center of Weimar. Mira’s fate recalls the death in January 1945 of Nabokov’s brother Sergei, a poet, homosexual and outspoken opponent of Hitler, in a Nazi camp next to Hamburg:

“One had to forget — because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.”

Nabokov tells Pnin’s story through an elusive narrator very like himself, who satirises a character who is essentially unlike himself. Both Nabokov and the narrator were born in St. Petersburg in 1899 and named Vladimir Vladimirovich. The narrator refers to an unnamed expert in butterflies and author of Russian novels published under the pseudonym of Sirin, who is obviously Nabokov. Most significantly, the narrator expresses Nabokov’s own fierce anti-Soviet beliefs and intellectual prejudices. He rather naively describes nineteenth-century Russian history under the oppressive czars, in which Nabokov’s father played a prominent role as minister of justice and progressive liberal statesman, as “a century of struggling justice and glimmering hope.”

This hope was completely extinguished by “thirty-five years of hopeless injustice” after the Revolution of 1917. The narrator also rather foolishly airs Nabokov’s familiar prejudices about artists greater than himself: Stendhal, Wagner, Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann. And the narrator, in excessive onslaughts, repeats Nabokov’s well known hostility to Freudian psychology, which has no scientific basis for its absurd claims. He mocks the Oedipus Complex and the “psychoasinine” theory that birth is “an act of suicide on the part of the infant.” Liza and her husband Eric Wind are both condemned for practicing psychiatry, a fraudulent profession.

Nabokov’s superior intelligence, learning and wit made him acutely aware of the suspicion and jealousy, malice and spite that contaminate many university departments. The academic satire begins in the novel when the narrator shifts his focus from Pnin to his students and colleagues. Pnin’s teaching methods are very different from those of Nabokov, who always prepared and performed his carefully written formal lectures. Their dazzling delivery and brilliant content baffled many students who didn’t know if he was “for real.” By contrast, he mocks chummy class discussions as “letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics” kick around a subject none of them understands.

Pnin no longer notices the existence of students on campus except as a brief distraction in the classroom. His approach to his work is amateurish and lighthearted, and he is forced to use a Russian grammar compiled by an old fraud and filled with blunders. He attracts very few students, especially during Senator Joe McCarthy’s purge of so-called Commies in the early l950s, when Russian fell out of favor and became a “practically dead language.” But Nabokov and Pnin have exactly the same attitude toward the typical American college student, “who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job.”

The narrator is merciless about the “campus dummies” who do no work or — ignoring Wittgenstein’s warning, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” — do worthless work. One hopeless drudge “had squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work dealing with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters.” Others secure generous travel grants for pointless studies: folk songs in East Germany, eating habits of Cuban fishermen and application of the Fingerbowl Test to determine “the proportion between length of digit and wetted part.”

Pnin’s friend Laurence Clements, a true scholar in the Philosophy Department, is the one bright star on the faculty. In a brilliant passage Nabokov compares Clements to a vivid figure in a famous Flemish painting: Jan van Eyck’s “Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele” (Bruges, 1436). The sixty-six-year-old Church Canon and donor of the painting, bald, kneeling and wearing a loose white robe, holds a pair of spectacles and a thick illuminated open book with a dangling buckled strap to close it. Clements vividly comes to life as the “ample-jowled, fluff-haloed Canon van der Paele, seized by a fit of abstraction in the presence of the puzzled Virgin to whom a super, rigged up as St. George, is directing the good Canon’s attention. Everything was there — the knotty temple, the sad, musing gaze, the folds and furrows of facial flesh, the thin lips, and even the wart on the left cheek.”

Though Pnin has escaped into exile with his life, he is a victim of history, pursued by the nightmares that haunt Russian fugitives. As Nabokov observes about the persistence of memory in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1959), “one of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth… straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past.” For Nabokov and Pnin the Russian past is as vivid as the American present. The Soviets had destroyed everything valuable in Russia, so Pnin and a few émigré friends, gathered for the summer in a palatial country house, try to preserve the essence of pre-revolutionary culture. In “One Art” the poet Elizabeth Bishop — orphaned in childhood and with a lover who killed herself — wrote, “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” But other exiles suffered worse fates than Pnin. Three eminent Jewish writers — Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig — found exile intolerable and committed suicide.

When Pnin loses his typed lecture en route to his audience in chapter one, he bitterly recalls, “he had lost, dumped, shed many more valuable things in his day”: family, lovers, house and money as well as education, profession, language and culture. For Oleg Komarov, a Cossack’s son and mural painter at Waindell, the ideal Russia was an impossible mish-mash of the czarist regime and Soviet state: “the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, [Rudolf Steiner’s] anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.” Yet, in a great scene, when Pnin watches an equally bogus Soviet agitprop film made in the late 1940s — with Kirghiz actors, peasant girls, coal miners, simple herdsmen, Moscow Metro, factory workers, soccer fans, electrical plant, Zim cars for the masses and unanimous votes for Stalin — he cannot control his nostalgic tears for this lost but completely unreal world. Pnin expresses his profoundest feelings when the ever-exploiting Liza leaves him for the fourth time and he laments, “I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!,” which defines his final disaster.

There has never been a regular Russian department at Waindell and Pnin’s academic existence depends entirely on employment by Professor Hagen, his staunch supporter and head of the German department. Pnin tells Hagen that after nine years as an untenured assistant professor, soon to be assistant emeritus, he hopes to be promoted to associate in 1961, the hundredth anniversary of the liberation of the Russian serfs. When Hagen hears that Pnin is planning to buy a house after a lifetime of wandering, he tells Pnin that he’s tired of fighting with his enemy in the German department and has accepted a better job at another university.

Though he naturally puts his own career first, he tries hard to secure a position for Pnin. But the chairman of the English department disapproves of everything Hagen has done and considers Pnin a joke. The chairman of French, who doesn’t know French, dislikes literature and thinks Chateaubriand was a famous chef, asserts that Pnin is not fit “to loiter in the vicinity of an American college.” When Hagen tells him that Pnin can speak and read French, but could if necessary descend to the level of the department, he’s brusquely told: “Then we can’t use him at all. As you know, we believe only in speech records or other mechanical devices. No books allowed.” Hagen’s cigar butt, quenched into a bunch of grapes, tells the whole story.

When Pnin finally realises that he’s been fired, in a bitter parody of the liberation of the serfs, Hagen assures him that his replacement — none other than the narrator of the novel — has promised to rehire him in the newly created Russian Division. The narrator, an old friend, turns out to be the littérateur who had had an affair with Liza, condemned her poetry and drove her to attempt suicide before Pnin married her. But Pnin, making as always the wrong decision, deliberately destroys his own career by telling Hagen, “there is one thing perfectly certain. I will never work under him.”

Pnin’s perverse decision is symbolised by the precious punch bowl (Nabokov’s version of Henry James’s Golden Bowl) that Victor gave him. Washing the dishes after his disastrous party, Pnin drops a nutcracker into the foamy water, cuts his hand on a sliver of broken glass and is ecstatic to find the beautiful bowl intact. The shattered glass symbolises his fate at Waindell; the elegant bowl his choice of Old World honor over American career. At the end of this deeply moving novel Pnin drives off to an indeterminate destination “where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.” But the miracle is illusory and will not happen. Pnin can’t teach, can’t write and can’t get another job. He has no certain future except a third heart attack following the two he’s experienced in the novel. As the narrator menacingly declares: “Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.” Pnin’s exile and loss will continue forever.