Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Start from a classic and follow its line, one work at a time, across the map.
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Start from a classic and follow its line, one work at a time, across the map.
Miguel de Cervantes, AD 1605
Nabokov lectured on Don Quixote at Harvard shortly before writing Pnin, and his gentle, mocked, unworldly professor is a Quixote of the American campus: laughed at by those around him, and better than all of them.
“According to Boyd, Pnin is Nabokov's response to Don Quixote, which he had read a year earlier.” Read it there
Nikolai Gogol, AD 1842
Pnin's flight from Waindell in his old blue sedan, at the end of the novel, recalls Chichikov's escape by carriage at the end of the first part of Gogol's Dead Souls, a book Nabokov wrote about.
“In terms of literary influences, Pnin's flight from Waindell in his blue car recalls Chichikov's flight from town by wagon, at the end of the first part of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.” Read it there
No later work in the atlas draws on Pnin yet.