"He's a real nowhere man": Migration, nostalgia, and double exile in Vladimir Nabokov's Praia

• Autores: Juan Ignacio Guijarro González
• Localización: Evolving origins, transplanting cultures: literary Legacies of the news Americans / coord. por Laura Alonso Gallo; Antonia Domínguez Miguela (aut.), 2002, ISBN 978-84-95699-70-1, págs. 157-168
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Shortly before the critical and commercial success of Lolita altered the course of his life forever, in 1957 Vladimir Nabokov published his novel Pnin, in which he explores the vicissitudes of a Russian emigre who teaches in the United States. Even though Nabokov always manifested his utter rejection of any kind of ideological literature with either social or political overtones, in Pnin he manages to offer a suggestive meditation on the meaning of exile, a traumatic experience which has been considered one of the defining features of the twentieth century. The protagonist of the novel, the humble and solitary college professor Timofey Pnin, is in every sense a victim of History, since he has been forced to escape from the two major totalitarian regimes of the century in Europe: the Soviet Revolution and the Third Reich. Therefore, he must successively renegotiate his cultural identity first in Europe and later in the United States. An exiled himself, Nabokov knew quite well the traumatic consequences that forced migration has on any individual; in a text markedly tinged with nostalgia and longing for the past like Pnin the effect is doubly irreparable, since it not only implies a separation from the motherland, but also from one's native language.