Nabokovs comic masterpiece charts the wry, bizarre progress of Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast-beating heart of the USA. A man of complex emotions, Pnin does halting battle with American life and lanuage. But in this moving, amusing story of a seemingly born loser at odds with the New World, there is all the pathos of a generation cruelly and irrevocably severed from its past.