Pnin

Published in 1957, Pnin is Nabokov's most amusing work. Its protagonist is Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, an émigré Russian professor in the United States who teaches a handful of students who regard him as a kind of rare phenomenon.

His difficulties in adapting to the American way of life are manifold. They range from household appliances and automobiles to the mediocrity of his colleagues, a bunch of ambitious people who test his patience.

But his greatest concern is not his rather respectable academic life, but his wife, a woman surrounded by psychiatrists who never loved him and for whom he remains movingly in love.

In the end, Pnin seems to find a kind of happiness, emerging as a civilized being capable of retaining some human dignity amid an incivilization that Nabokov himself must have experienced at Cornell and Wellesley Universities.

Vladimir Nabokov - An American writer of Russian origin, born in 1899 and died in 1977, he went into exile with his family in England, France, and Germany. In the latter country, he wrote the first part of his literary work in Russian, among which Mashenka and Glory stand out.

In 1940 he left for the United States of America, acquiring American nationality in 1945. He began writing in English, maintaining in the works of this period the fantastic background, the ironic vision of everyday life, and the formal mastery he had already demonstrated, and aimed to create a portrait of North American society through its cultural conventions and attitudes towards sex.