In this short but pungent and entirely characteristic novel, Nabokov tells the tragi-comic story of Professor Timofey Pnin - savant, emigre and linguist, happy in scholarship but disappointed in life and in love. With the lightest of touches the author sketches in a whole history from a few inconsequential episodes. A faculty party, a shipboard encounter, a series of rented rooms, give us the story coloured by fantastic humour and deep pathos. Published two years after Lolita and sharting that novel’s pin-sharp observation and linguistic virtuosity, PNIN is an altogether gentler drama, recognizably descended from the fantastic humour of Gogol on the one hand, and the tender realism of Chekhov on the other.