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Vladimir Nabokov Was a Prophet
A year after the birth of Vladimir Putin in Leningrad (USSR, 1952), the world-famous writer Vladimir Nabokov began writing a novel that later became something of a prophet. Pnin was Vladimir Nabokov’s thirteenth novel, fourth English novel and the third to be written in the United States (1953–1957). Its first chapter was written before famous Lolita was finished. The protagonists of both novels are émigrés and men of letters; they are also antipodes as characters.
The main character created by Nabokov, Timophey 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.
Tragically lonely, farcically speaking, poor and old-fashioned Timophey Pnin is not the hero of tragicomedy alone.
Various comic contexts in the novel cast Pnin in an ambivalent light, but the ambivalence works in an unconventional way: the tragic lurks behind the clownish, and the sublime shines through the comic. Pnin is a tragicomic character, portraying in grotesque form those features of the Russian emigration culture and Russian spirit that Vladimir Nabokov (being himself an emigrant) seems to have been ashamed of.
Thus, in terms of culture, Pnin is not a unique but incredibly distinctive phenomenon.