Forget Lolita. Try Pnin.

How much 20th century literature was created by refugees? “Just judging by the Nobel laureates who were exiles from their homeland — a list that includes Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky — one might assume that themes of exile and homelessness permeated the modernist literary canon,” writes Ted Gioia. But not so. Many of them remained embedded in the their homeland, however, and did not produced a literature of displacement and the modern experience of exile, certainly not enough to make a large dent in the canon.

I would argue that Joseph Brodsky’s great theme, or one of them, was exile … but Ted is focusing on the novel, not poetry, and he homes in on one exception to the rule in “Did Vladimir Nabokov Write the Great Refugee Novel?” in The Millions.  Forget about Lolita. It’s Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Pnin.

From the article:

This Russian émigré would seem an unlikely candidate to focus on the plight of refugees. Nabokov left his homeland behind at the end of his teen years, was educated at the University of Cambridge, and was so successful at assimilation that he learned to write the Queen’s English better than the Queen — and her subjects too. If one is seeking a success story from the ranks of the displaced, Nabokov is the ideal candidate. Not only did he survive as a writer in his new language, but he became that greatest of rarities, an American literary lion who was also a bestseller.

He fought his way to the top.

Yet Pnin arrived at bookstores before Nabokov had tasted these successes.  And even literary acclaim could never assuage the bitterness of displacement and family tragedy. Nabokov’s father was killed in 1922 by another Russian exile and his brother Sergei later died in a German concentration camp. Around the time of his father’s death, the young author’s engagement to Svetlana Siewert was broken off because of her parents’ concern that Nabokov could not earn enough to support their daughter.  His subsequent marriage to Véra Evseyevna Slonim brought with it subsequent risks because of her Jewish antecedents.  When Nabokov left for the in the U.S. aboard the SS Champlain on May 19, 1940, he had already spent two decades of nomadic existence as a man without a country. He was not coming to America to seek fame and fortune, but rather as a last desperate move to escape the Nazis, who would enter Paris in triumph a few days later.

These experiences set the tone, of bitterness mixed with nostalgia for a vanished world, that permeates the pages of Pnin. The main character, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, is a comic figure on the campus of Waindell College. His old-fashioned continental ways and thick Russian accent are mimicked and ridiculed. His improvisations and mispronunciations turn familiar terms into extravagant variants — for example, his order of whisky and soda ends up sounding like “viscous and sawdust.”  When asking for the receipt in a restaurant, the best he can come up with is a request for the “quittance.”  His appearance, his gestures, and his general lack of awareness of American manners are fodder for campus gossip and mockery.

One very tiny quibble: It’s a myth that Nabokov mastered English – he never really had to. It was one of his cradle languages, in an upper-crust multilingual household (some even contend that it was in fact his first language).

Of course, we know what happened to Nabokov after he came to America. He came to Stanford. We wrote about that here. But first read the rest of Ted’s essay here.