Character Analysis
In a nutshell: Pnin is a bumbling idiot! Or at least that's what he seems to be at first glance. He acts just as if he's come straight out of a Russian version of the Three Stooges. But our dear professor is not really an idiot, and not exactly bumbling either. He's just…"unique."
Well, he's just…Pninian!
Pninian is a term made up by one of the characters to describe the particular brand of strangeness that is Timofey Pnin. Not only is he weird-looking (bald, tan, fat around the waist but with tiny little spindly legs), but he also acts pretty oddly and has funny taste in the world around him.
The narrator tells us,
Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings after a storm in the middle of the night had paralyzed the local power station. The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid- bridge, leaving him with two identical pieces, which he would vaguely attempt to unite, in the hope, perhaps, of some organic marvel of restoration coming to the rescue. The zipper a gentleman depends on most would come loose in his puzzled hand at some nightmare moment of haste and despair. (1.8)
Whoa, dude. This is a guy who just can't seem to understand the most basic elements of the world around him. Okay, sometimes alarm clocks can be kind of weird, but we're sure he should be able to handle a zipper.
So from this picture, we get the idea that everything seems to go wrong for Pnin. He seems sort of like an alien who is not meant to be living in this world or time period. Well, it's kind of true, but we'll talk more about that later.
What's important to know is that poor Pnin just doesn't fit in. It's not that he's stupid, but just that he's confused. And that leads him to act in ways that most people would consider kinda strange.
The Nutty Professor
Pnin's profession only adds to his air of not belonging. He actually has a PhD in sociology and political economy from the University of Prague, which you'd think would be a pretty big deal, but nope. The narrator says it "had become by mid-century a doctorate in desuetude" (1.5). Which is a fancier way to pronounce disuse-i-tude. Instead, Pnin is now a Russian professor, and he's not actually very good at teaching Russian to his four students.
Plus, it seems like no one at the University likes him. Most of them consider him an idiot, and the actual academic skills that he has are completely unused. In other words, it's not that Pnin is a bad professor because he doesn't have the skills, but instead it's because everyone doesn't allow him to actually teach the things he's good at. Like sociology and political economy, for example.
Pnin's relationship with the world is perfectly explained in this quote: "It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence" (1.8). See? It's not Pnin's fault if the world is crazy!
Or is He Nabokovian?
While Nabokov goes to great efforts to make Pnin uniquely odd, there's also something else going on here.
If you know enough about our author, you'll see little bits of him creeping into our protagonist's personality. For example, the narrator tells us, "He was utterly helpless without the prepared text….Pnin's worried eye would be bound to lose its bearings. Therefore he preferred reading his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators" (1.10).
It just so happens that this was Nabokov style of delivering lectures. Apparently, just like Pnin, Nabokov couldn't take his eyes off the text, leading to very particular delivery style.
There is another moment where the narrator tells us about Pnin's research style. He says: "Index cards were gradually loading a shoe box with their compact weight" (6.4.1). It's possible that this is not a reference to Nabokov at all, but just talking about the way many older scholars recorded their notes (remember, this is before the good days of the laptop).
However, since Nabokov it's kind of obsessive about his index cards and uses them for all of his novels, we're going to guess that it has more than a little bit of an autobiographical implication. See, we're learning so much!
All of this is not really that big of a deal until you think about the weirdness of the narrator. With the initials VN, it makes perfect sense that you assume the narrator is Nabokov inserting himself into the story. But if Pnin is actually slightly Nabokovian, what does that make the narrator? Are they both little Nabokovs? Or neither of them?
He's an Alien. A Legal Alien.
In case you didn't get it, a large part of Pnin's character is that he's a Russian émigré. He was born in St. Petersburg, his parents died of typhus during the Civil War after the Russian Revolution, and he worked for the White Army (the side that fought against the Bolsheviks trying to take charge), escaped to Paris in 1925, and fled to the United States at the beginning of World War II. Even if you don't know a lot about the Russian Revolution and Civil War, you can probably guess that Pnin's history includes a lot of death and sadness.
Just one aspect of that is his constant homelessness, both literally and figuratively. Obviously, Russia was Pnin's home, but because of the Civil War he had to flee his home. Not only is Pnin homeless because he left St. Petersburg, and eventually all of Russia—in addition, the revolution turned Russia into country that he could no longer recognize. It was an entirely different place from the Russia that he grew up in. So even if Pnin were to return to Russia, it wouldn't be "home."
We mean, this guy doesn't even celebrate his birthday, for crying out loud, and all because of his strange relationship with Russia. The narrator says: "Tuesday—true; but what day of the month, we wonder. Pnin's birthday for instance fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis" (3.3.2).
First of all, motuweth frisas is Pnin's weirdo abbreviation for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…you get the gist. Yeah, we had to think about that for a minute. As for the dates, the Julian calendar that was used in Russia when Pnin grew up is slightly off from the Gregorian calendar that the majority of the Western world uses, and the Bolsheviks switched to match everyone else once they took charge. So technically, Pnin's birthday falls on a different day, based on an obsolete calendar. But instead of just celebrating it then, Pnin just completely forgets that he has a birthday.
If that isn't the definition of rootless, we don't know what is.
A Shadow on His Heart
You probably noticed that a lot of wild, kind of hallucinogenic stuff happens in this novel. It's not because Pnin is on drugs, but because he has some kind of heart condition. We're not sure if he's having a heart attack, a seizure, or if it's something else entirely, but something is definitely causing some psychedelic moments.
Here's what the narrator says about Pnin's medical condition:
Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For the nonce I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it. My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ('a hollow, muscular organ,' according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. Occasionally, when puzzled by his tumbling and tottering pulse, doctors examined him more thoroughly, the cardiograph outlined fabulous mountain ranges and indicated a dozen fatal diseases that excluded one another. (1.2.23)
Okay, helpful. First of all, we know that the narrator is unreliable so we are not going to take his word for it that Pnin wasn't having a seizure or heart attack. We don't know which, but we're still going to take whatever Mr. Narrator says with a grain of salt. But what's interesting about this paragraph is that even the doctors don't seem to be able to figure out what's wrong with our poor Pnin. All he knows that something is going on and they see some kind of shadow on his heart that shouldn't be there.
Lucky for us, we don't have to be doctors to figure out what's going on with Pnin. We are pretty sure that his issue is figurative, not literal. After all, he's a literary character, so he is allowed to have figurative heart problems show up as physical manifestations.
The Colors of the Wind
Part one of Pnin's heart problems is Dr. Liza Wind, his ex-wife. Let's just start out by showing you the letter that he wrote as his marriage proposal. He said: "I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy" (7.3.6).
If that doesn't make you at least a little warm and squishy inside, you might need to get your heart checked out. Obviously, Pnin was head over heels for this lady. So why is she his ex-wife?
Well, the problem with Liza is that she's a player. She couldn't stop flirting with everyone and anyone, including our narrator. So she ends up getting pregnant from an extramarital affair with this guy called Dr. Eric Wind. Not only that, but she tries to convince Pnin that she's actually returning to her hubby after the affair. Why? Basically in order to get Pnin to foot the bill for her passage to America, not to mention prenatal care.
And that's not all. Liza then expects Pnin to basically pay child support for the kid he's never even met and definitely isn't his while she runs off to marry a third guy, named George. Yes, we can see how having a relationship with this lady could mess up your heart.
His First Heartache
But wait. Liza wasn't even the origin of Pnin's heartache. That honor goes to a lady named Mira Belochkin. Before Pnin ever even met Liza, there was Mira.
We learn about her when Pnin has another one of his heart episodes and starts to hallucinate. Before the revolution, they were probably going to get married. But then they were forced to go in separate ways, she got married to someone else, and then the worst happened. Nazis killed Mira in a German concentration camp.
She doesn't come up until near the end of the novel because Pnin has tried to suppress her memory. The narrator says: "In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible" (5.5.16).
Let's break that down. If Pnin didn't suppress this horrible, heart-wrenching memory, he probably wouldn't be able to stay sane. But we guess during the near-death experiences caused by his heart condition, these memories escape Pnin's control.
So underneath all of the buffoonery and the strangeness of Pnin's character is a pretty big mountain of sadness. At the beginning of the novel, we are probably like everyone else and see the professor as some kind of joke. But by the end of the novel, we know that he's a full person with a deep and dark history. And that's exactly what makes the ending so poignant, because we have realized that Pnin has feelings just like us only in time to see all of his hopes and dreams crushed by Dr. Hagen.
Now we get why the original title was My Poor Pnin.
Pnin's Timeline