Argh. I feel like a blockhead.

I don't get it. I really don't get it.

All I can do is blame a "Russian sense of humor" (but then I am reminded that he lived in the US and wrote in English, but I still contend it's a Russian sense of humor).

The references are so erudite; the humor so based on being well-versed in so much classical education.

And bad things just keep happening to him. It's not funny- it's horrifying.

There might be some symbolism lurking in there, but I need my high school AP English teacher (oh, where are you now, Mrs. Orman??) to decipher it for me.

Funny note: the reviewer's quote on the front cover of the Bard edition I read uses the word "brilliant". It is misspelled.

Now that's funny. ( )

as the kids say: "i would die" for timofey pnin.

even though most of this book was pretty boring sorry vlad ( )

I recently read an essay on cancel culture. Its essential point was that exile from one's tribe was for most of human history considered worse than death. But in the view of those who would cancel at the drop of an ill-considered remark, losing one's job (exile from a career, exile from a way of life) is a trivial thing. "Oh, he'll find other work." Well, it's not quite that easy, as Nabokov's Pnin brilliantly and hilariously illustrates. ( )

Geschenk von Anna Liss

It is the gravity of the language that enchanted me - direct and descriptive with the mass of the occasional metaphor forcing an image into view. Otherwise an almost insignificant tale of a once bourgeois Russian scholar seemingly oblivious to how mocked and minimally tolerated he is at a small New England university in the 1950s McCarthy era. The final chapter, told in an much differently focused fashion jars loose some of the certainties of all earlier ones. ( )