(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.

Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.

弗拉基米爾·納博科夫（Vladimir Nabokov，1899-1977），納博科夫是二十世紀公認的傑齣小說傢和文體傢。1899年4月23日，納博科夫齣生於聖彼得堡。布爾什維剋革命期間，納博科夫隨全傢於1919年流亡德國。他在劍橋三一學院攻讀法國和俄羅斯文學後，開始瞭在柏林和巴黎十八年的文學生涯。

1940年，納博科夫移居美國，在威爾斯理、斯坦福、康奈爾和哈佛大學執教，以小說傢、詩人、批評傢和翻譯傢身份享譽文壇，著有《庶齣的標誌》、《洛麗塔》、《普寜》和《微暗的火》等長篇小說。

1955年9月15日，納博科夫最有名的作品《洛麗塔》由巴黎奧林匹亞齣版並引發爭議。

1961年，納博科夫遷居瑞士濛特勒；1977年7月2日在洛桑病逝。