Born in St. Petersburg in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov was a struggling writer until “Lolita” catapulted him to fame and fortune two years after “Pnin” was published in 1953. Nabokov taught Russian and European literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Harvard and Cornell University to make ends meet. “Pnin” is no doubt based on his own teaching experiences.
Reading any of his more than two dozen published works, it’s astonishing to realize that English was not his…