I recently accepted an invitation to join a book club (my first) and the book we will be discussing this evening is the one I suggested: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. He wrote it in part to show Americans that the Russian émigré community did not consist entirely – or at all – of rabid Trotskyites, but contained a large number of liberal intellectuals like himself. Today, when we hear the word “Russian” and think hacker or doper, the novel can serve the same corrective purpose.
