Pnin
Pnin is Vladimir Nabokov's fourth English-language novel . Nabokov began it in 1953 and finished it in 1955. Chapter 1 appeared on November 28, 1953 in the New Yorker , also there chapters 3, 4 and 6 in the course of 1955. The complete book in seven chapters was published in 1957. The first German translation was published in 1960 and a second in 1994.
The work is named after its main character: Timofei Pnin, an always tragicomic, misfortune-prone antihero , an elderly, lovable and sensitive college professor in the USA during the 1950s.
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At the provincial college of Waindell in New York State, Professor Pnin is regarded as a touching old-fashioned scholar, academic original, European gem or an impossible owl , depending on your opinion. In his little-attended courses, he teaches Russian and Russian literature, his mother tongue - useless in Cold War America .
Professor Pnin sees his life primarily characterized by losses. As a teenager he lost his two beloved parents in quick succession, soon afterwards his beloved homeland to the Bolsheviks , his great childhood love to the murderous hands of the SS in the Holocaust , his new refuge, Prague and Paris, to the invading Wehrmacht and the love of his wife Lisa finally on the ship that took him to America in 1940 to another, smarter man.
Professor Pnin is a loser and a lost one, uprooted in many ways and always remains a foreign body in America, even if after many years with just one Nansen pass he proudly and happily accepts the new citizenship. American culture, or, as he understands it, the total lack of culture, is difficult for him to cope with. He learns the English language with difficulty and so imperfectly that, even after years, he needs the help of an assistant to formulate his lectures and lectures. After more than a decade, he has still not managed to make a home for himself in America, not even in Waindell, because he apparently does not feel at home in the new world. At the beginning of the book, Waindell is described as a “university shelter”.
A constant theme of the novel is Pnin's progress in establishing himself at home in America. Initially, he lives in faculty dormitories or sublet. He hesitantly tries to set up his own office for his modest but private cabinet of his erudition in a former junk room of the university, to "pininize" it. A professor from Austria who was also billeted there soon after and who was deeply unsympathetic to Pnin and his dog ruined this attempt. In his private life, he gradually succeeds in converting the initially quite unsentimental sublease into that of a house guest with a family connection, until the daughter of his landlord moves back home after her failed marriage - a new loss for Pnin. After an unsatisfactory interlude as a sub-tenant with two aged brothers, he finally made the leap and made a home for himself. He becomes the master of his own house, only to find out at his housewarming party that the director of his chair is planning to leave Waindell and that his successor is N. of all people. Since Pnin refuses to work with or better under N. for personal reasons, he has to give up his job at college and seek a teaching position elsewhere. Professor Pnin is homeless again.
Pnin bravely bears all these losses, the big and small defeats. His motto is: “You have to face fate.” Despite all the blows in the neck of fate, he does not despair. He is basically a cheerful, optimistic spirit. On the other hand, he is always embarrassingly aware of the insidiousness of animate and inanimate objects and, above all, of chance. That is why he is overly cautious and laboriously endeavored not to avoid accidents, but to exclude them, only to then fulfill his unhappy fate all the more surely and precisely to get into new, completely different accidents.
His overcautiousness and fear also relate to his body, whose condition he always observes with suspicion. Nabokov knows how to connect occasional cardiac arrhythmias with dreamlike visions of the past and thus introduce the reader to loved ones from the past or from Pnin's distant experiences.
The narrator N.
The reader sees everything through the eyes of the narrator observing Pnin, N. Assumptions that Nabokov could have brought his own real person into the novel with N. fail because of biographical reality. Although a character in the novel himself, N. is largely an omniscient narrator who even addresses the reader repeatedly. He has precise knowledge of Pnin's emotional state at every moment, he is able to describe the plot of the novel at any location, regardless of his own presence there or that of Pnin, but then suddenly takes up the role of a first-person narrator again , who shared at least part of his past and Lisa's love with Pnin and claims not to have seen him for 40 years. Pnin tries again and again to keep N. at a distance, possibly because of his former relationship with Lisa.
Form of narrative
The story is not presented as a classic novel with a continuous storyline. Instead, chapters of different lengths are lined up as a seemingly loose sequence of narratives. The focus is always on Pnin, which is shown in ever new contexts: Pnin on the train, on the way to a lecture. Pnin as a subtenant. Pnin as a lecturer in the struggle with the English language. Pnin and meeting his ex-wife Lisa, who is still taking advantage of him. Pnin and Lisa's son Victor, for whom Pnin has money and fatherly feelings. Pnin in the company of other Russians in exile. Pnin as landlord and host. Initially hardly connected, these descriptions finally close artfully to a circle in which the end of the novel is also its beginning. The book, which ostensibly presents itself as an unspectacular approach to the slightly ridiculous person Pnins, is interwoven with a complex web of relationships, hints, hints, motifs and symbols. Above all, the novel enchants with its filigree, finely ramified story that always shines through behind the character Pnins. In Pnin, Nabokov combines cheerful, Pushkin-like lightness with the depths of human tragedy.
The novel also knows how to inspire in language and style, is always accurate and precise. John Updike says: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is ecstatically.” (Nabokov writes prose in the only way it should be written, namely ecstatically.)
reception
The figure of Professor Pnin is also mentioned in Nabokov's Pale Fire from 1962.
Expenses (selection)
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Pnin . Heinemann, 1957
- Pnin . Translated by Curt Meyer-Clason . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1960
- Pnin . Translated and edited by Dieter E. Zimmer . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, special edition 2004
- Pnin. Ulrich Matthes reads "Pnin" in the translation by Dieter E. Zimmer . Audioverlag 2002. The audio book was awarded the 2003 German Audio Book Prize for best entertainment and as Audio Book of the Year 2002.
literature
- Dieter E. Zimmer: Appendices to the Pnin edition 1999: Pnins Leben. A calendar ; Afterword by the editor ; Release calendar; Bibliography, notes.
- Michael Maar : Seven Ways to Read Nabokov's Pnin. , Siemens Foundation, Munich 2003
- Michael Maar: Solus Rex. The beautiful evil world of Vladimir Nabokov . Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2007
- Galya Diment: Timofey Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marc Szeftel , Nabokov Studies, Volume 3, 1996, pp. 53-75
Web links
Individual evidence