Pnin & Pan

PNIN (191 pp.) --Vladimir Nabokov--Doubleday ($3.50).

Timofey Pnin is a Russian emigre professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather be wrong than hesitant, and no doughtier comic immigrant has set foot on the shores of U.S. fiction since Timofey's "tvin" dialectician H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N.

Novelist Vladimir (Bend Sinister) Nabokov, 57, himself an emigre Russian and a Cornell professor of Russian literature, does more than sound-track his hero for laughs; in unobtrusive flashbacks he captures the underlying pathos of exile. Leafing through an emigre journal, Pnin sees his dead father and mother in the lamplit serenity of their pre-Revolutionary home; stonily viewing a Soviet documentary film, he bursts into tears at a sudden glimpse of the Russian countryside in springtime.

Most of the time bald, myopic, barrel-chested, spindly-legged Pnin wrestles mirthfully with his fate even though he loses most of the falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture vultures and modern art ("Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood"). For the rest, Pnin's centripetal personality holds this novel together, and his centrifugal English keeps the laughs flying.

Unlike Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov learned English at his English governess' knee. His family belonged to the landed Russian aristocracy, but his liberal-minded father gave up his position at the Tsar's court, sardonically advertised his court uniform for sale, later was assassinated by Russian monarchists. As a refugee from the Revolution, Vladimir worked for a Cambridge degree, lived in France and Germany, wrote eight novels in Russian.

Since coming to the U.S. in 1940, Nabokov has divided his time among teaching, lepidopterology (he is a professional collector with several unique butterfly specimens to his credit) and a brilliant new literary career in which he has evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting.

Yet Nabokov is in the strange position of a man whose career is leading a double life, for the most remarkable demonstration of his fictional powers is a novel virtually unknown in the U.S. or abroad. As dark and demoniac as Pnin is gentle and sunlit, this novel has in the past year become a sotto voce scandal on two continents. Lolita, published in English by France's Olympia Press, gives the pornography-v.-art debate its most combustible tinder since Judge Woolsey handed down his famed decision on Ulysses.

Pursuit of Nymphets. The theme of Nabokov's Lolita is the carnal pursuit of a twelve-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze by a middle-aged European emigre in the U.S. named Humbert Humbert. The lurch toward the farcical, implicit in the hero's name, sets the mood and tempo of the entire work. The first of the novel's two volumes becomes an elaborately breakneck, amorally funny chase that mixes the Marx Brothers with Krafft-Ebing. This blurs but does not erase the underlying sensuality of Humbert's admittedly perverse tastes, for he is drawn only to what he calls "nymphets"--near-adolescent girls of mysterious characteristics and an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm." The insidious charm of Dolores, whom Humbert dubs Lolita, lurks in the eye of the beholder, for she is a Coke-fed, juke-box-operated brat with a headful of movie mags for a brain. To stay close to her, Humbert marries her widowed mother and is ready to murder mamma when a passing Packard does the job for him.

The shocker that leaves Humbert a chastened European innocent is that Lolita seduces him. For she is an experienced hoyden who has already been ravished at a fashionable summer camp. In the second volume the sexual farce is more corrosive and the human comedy less exuberant. The couple embark on a kind of illicit grand tour of the 48 states; the settings--hotels, motels and tourist traps--have the infernal cast of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Humbert's would-be child bride is stolen from him by a playwright with an Aztec Red convertible. When Humbert sees Lolita again she is a post-nymphet 17, pregnant and married to a wholesome ex-G.I. But she still loves the playwright, and in a hilarious and nightmarish murder scene Humbert pumps bullet after bullet into him while the victim protests with phony British aplomb: "Ah. that hurts, sir, enough! Ah, that hurts atrociously, my dear fellow. I pray you, desist."

Who's Mature? To the charge of pornography, Nabokov in effect replies, in the Anchor Review, that he need not have gone to this much trouble to be pornographic since "in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of cliches." One critic believes that what Nabokov intended was "a joke on/our national cant about Youth." Graham Greene, who calls Lolita a "distinguished novel," has founded a fictitious anti-pornographic society which needles the book's moralistic critics. Harvard's Professor Harry Levin insists Lolita is "a great book, not primarily sexual at all . . . a symbol of the aging European intellectual coming to America, falling in love with it but finding it, sadly, a little immature."

The U.S. Customs, which immaturely barred Ulysses, finds nothing legally obscene in Lolita. But the mature French Ministry of the Interior, apparently pressured by the British Home Secretary, has brought suit to prevent the continued French publication of Lolita on the ground that it is falling into the hands of immature British and American tourists. Nabokov is happily busy with a less controversial work of art, his 2,000-page translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

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