Subject
Matthew Stadler's Review of PNINIAD (fwd)
Date
Body
From _THE STRANGER, (a Seattle newspaper) Oct. 30, 1997.
Timofey Pnin, the sad comic hero of Vladimir Nabokov's blistering send-up
of American academia, PNIN, is based largely on a Russian emigre, Marc
Szeftel, who taught with Nabokov at Cornell, then came West to Seattle and
the UW. Szeftel's links to Nabokov and PNIN -- which came out just before
LOLITA burst upon the world -- have been excavated by Galya Diment (a
Slavic Languages Professor at the UW) in her book PNINIAD. This compact,
heavily researched book is both a charming biography of the sad,
perenially left-out Szeftel, and a treasure-trove of glimpses into the
fraught rituals of academia. We see the exams Nabokov set for his grad
[sic] students -- "what color was the bottle containing the arsenic with
which Emma Bovary poisoned herself?" -- observe him tag-team teaching with
faithful wife Vera, witness the rampant anti-semitism and sexism that kept
some academics (including Szeftel) on a slow climb towards a
glass-ceiling, and encounter some major academic conflicts (such as
Harvard professor Roman Jakobson's objection to Nabokov's bid for
chairmanship [sic] of the Russian Literature department -- "I do respect
very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of zoology?).
Beyond offering a lively glimpse of this arcane subculture, PNINIAD gives
a first-rate reading of PNIN, plus some insight into the creative process
of the greatest English language writer of this century.
Matthew Stadler.
Timofey Pnin, the sad comic hero of Vladimir Nabokov's blistering send-up
of American academia, PNIN, is based largely on a Russian emigre, Marc
Szeftel, who taught with Nabokov at Cornell, then came West to Seattle and
the UW. Szeftel's links to Nabokov and PNIN -- which came out just before
LOLITA burst upon the world -- have been excavated by Galya Diment (a
Slavic Languages Professor at the UW) in her book PNINIAD. This compact,
heavily researched book is both a charming biography of the sad,
perenially left-out Szeftel, and a treasure-trove of glimpses into the
fraught rituals of academia. We see the exams Nabokov set for his grad
[sic] students -- "what color was the bottle containing the arsenic with
which Emma Bovary poisoned herself?" -- observe him tag-team teaching with
faithful wife Vera, witness the rampant anti-semitism and sexism that kept
some academics (including Szeftel) on a slow climb towards a
glass-ceiling, and encounter some major academic conflicts (such as
Harvard professor Roman Jakobson's objection to Nabokov's bid for
chairmanship [sic] of the Russian Literature department -- "I do respect
very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of zoology?).
Beyond offering a lively glimpse of this arcane subculture, PNINIAD gives
a first-rate reading of PNIN, plus some insight into the creative process
of the greatest English language writer of this century.
Matthew Stadler.