''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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and-smiles at, there emerges quite a different person:
someone who suffers from "real exile", a "complete loss
of home and cultural ties", and a "total absence of
love. "35 As the exile, Pnin can be himself only once
every two years when he meets other exiled Russians,
who share his background and his values, at the place
of a friend, Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov; he has
much love and affection to give, and wants them, and
yet finds himself in a world where "nobody really
loves anybody" (62), and he is left, even after thirty-
five years, with no certain possession but his sorrows:
"Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world
people really possess? " he himself asks at one point
(52). And at the very moment that
, he thinks that he
has found something to make up for his past miseries:
a permanent job and a neat little house of his own,
when he bravely tries to convince himself that
had there been
...
no Russian Revolution,
no exodus, no expatriation in France, no
naturalization in America, everything
- at the best, at the best, Timofey! -
would have been the same: a professorship
in Kharkov or Kazan, a suburban house
such as this, old books within, late
blooms without (144-145),
he finds that his wanderings are not yet over. He is
no longer wanted at Waindell College.
However, his suffering is saved from degenerating
into melodrama; at no point is there any tearful sen-
timentality about Pnin, and Pnin himself of
course,
never gives way to self-pity and never accepts the
victim's
role.
36 When grievous memories become too
strong to be born, he bans them, and even the end,