The novel Pnin might be considered a complex and contradictory work. This is the story of an ordinary man. Timofei Pnin, who is unlucky in life, who is not perceived as a person by people of his environment. Self-affirmation in a foreign country as a teacher, unhappy love, jokes and ridicule on the part of friends and acquaintances - the hero encounters all this throughout the narrative.
As a main character, Timofei Pavlovich Pnin is a teacher of Russian literature in one of the American colleges. He is a good-natured eccentric and a loser. With his idiosyncratic English and his unhappy ability to do exactly what he does not need, he constantly finds himself in the most ridiculous positions: he sits on the wrong train, loses the manuscript of his lecture, then takes some people for others.
It seems that at first the plot begins to ridicule this unlucky man in life, but later this feeling is changed into worrying about him. But pity towards his character is not the author’s purpose, he shows what kind of emigrants are abroad. Central matters, here, are how hard it is to achieve significance, how not easy it is to find friends. The piece of given literature is a bright example of emigrant prose which advances the theme of lienation of the protagonist, the theme of a lost and abandoned motherland which the protagonist cannot find anywhere. Pnin is a Russian who stayed unable to become American.
This is a story of life and self-assertion - the problems and failures that we so often encounter. Nabokov's novel is imbued with that deep sense of love for individuals, even down to the most humiliated and pathetic ones.
