Russian Portraits
ARGUS, M. K.
Russian Portraits Pnin. Revieived by M. K. Argus By Vladimir Nabokov. Author, "Moscow-on-the-Hudson," Doubleday. 191 pp. $3.50. "A Rogue With Ease" There is no greater joy than the joy of...
...He may, when setting out on a journey to deliver a lecture before a group of culture-seeking American females, take the wrong train, or else he may, having accidentally taken the right train, deliver the wrong lecture...
...More than that...
...A Rogue With Ease" There is no greater joy than the joy of discovering between the covers of a book someone you have known well most of your life...
...After fleeing our own country we have lived in many lands and lived through many tragedies and it is quite a remarkable feat of the Russian character that we are not quite as crazy as we ought to be or as people think we are...
...You put down the book and say to yourself, chuckling happily: Why, that Pnin is no other than my own good friend Ivan Ivanovich...
...but he would never misquote Pushkin or Lermontov...
...of unsolicited adventures, displaced persons to the whole world as well as to ourselves...
...He is an American citizen now, teaches Russian literature to a tiny class of several dedicated American youths at Waindell College (Pnin pronounces it Vandal College, and it is very possible that he is right), has a brand nevy set of dentures, a son not quite his own but most definitely his former wife's, a number of American professorial colleagues, and a furnished room in the house of one of them...
...There is something about a story in the New Yorker—those narrow strips of narrative on an interminable number of pages, each strip smothered by mighty columns advertising perfumes or nylon blouses—that overwhelms me and causes my mind to wander away into other, less lofty spheres...
...The pages about Planned Parenthood and the Fingerbowl Test for Children should be made compulsory reading for anyone who quotes Freud or Adler...
...Pnin not only resembles some of our good friends, he resembles us—all of us Russians, expatriates of innumerable flights and multitudinous adjustments, victims (or heroes...
...Professor Timofey Pnin is an old Russian emigre, that is, he has fled Russia in the early years of the Communist regime and settled into a free but precarious existence in Western Europe...
...Both Pnins—the man and the book —are altogether delightful...
...An exact replica, a "vylityi" Ivan Ivanovich, as Vladimir Nabokov would put it parenthetically...
...Professor Pnin also has a fine Russian mind that is, however, occasionally absent...
...No Russian professor is so absent-minded as to misquote Pushkin and Lermontov...
...Nabokov knows very well the people who inhabit the halls and lawns of Academe, and with his blend of whimsy and realism, humor and sadness, sarcasm and understanding, he paints a series of fine impressionistic portraits and pictures...
...We are merely, to use a Nabokovian phrase, Pninian...
...Most of the stories have previously appeared in the New Yorker but they are infinitely better in the book...
...Waindell is a small college, and, as we all know, the next worst thing to a big college is a small one...
...After the Second World War, Timofey Pnin has found his way to these United States...
...There are many astute observations in the book on American, Russian and Pninian incongruities and foibles, with a few particularly sharp thrusts directed against the pompous idiocies of modern psychiatry and psychology...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 21
