NABOKOV, Vladimir.

Pnin.

London: Heinemann , 1957.

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First Edition of Vladimir Nobokov's Pnin

First British edition of this ‘campus novel’, a subgenre which was beginning to manifest itself in the early Fifties. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light wear. Jacket design by Faczynski. A very sharp example.

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).