Pnin.

NABOKOV, Vladimir.

Item Number: 74036

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957.

First American edition of this ‘campus novel’, a subgenre which was beginning to manifest itself in the early Fifties. . Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a very good dust jacket with light rubbing to the extremities. Jacket design by Milton Glaser.

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically" (John Updike).