This fall, I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin1 for the first time, having read Lolita for the first time decades ago. I mention this timeline because, while it took me nearly 40 years to get to Pnin, Nabokov went to work immediately on the novel while still wrapping up Lolita. More precisely, Nabokov originally wrote and published parts of Pnin as a series of short stories in The New Yorker immediately after writing Lolita and while shopping around for a publisher. Finding a publisher was such a taxing effort that, in a letter to one of his friends, Nabokov wrote that Pnin provided him with a “brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell.”
I regret discovering only recently the joy of Pnin. Just as writing Pnin was a sunny escape for Nabokov, reading it became one for me, transporting me back to a childhood filled with the deadpan comedy of Peter Sellers. When I made the connection of Nabokov’s protagonist, Timofey Pnin, to Sellers—which happened almost instantly, somewhere between Pnin’s modesty while living in a squalid apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris and when it was revealed he was on the wrong train—I realized what an incredible opportunity was missed in the early 1960s. Just imagine:
Coming Soon! Pnin, the new Blake Edwards film starring Peter Sellers as Timofey Pnin featuring an original soundtrack by Henry Mancini!
Peter Sellers would’ve so masterfully captured the nuance in Timofey Pnin’s comedic awkwardness, neuroticism, and pensiveness. Characters as memorable as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party and the forever bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films were definitively Pninian. It’s like a hole in my heart, realizing that this film will only ever live in my imagination. I want to believe that a copy exists—that it was somehow produced in secret with a final cut making it onto film, only to be tragically lost one evening, falling behind a bureau in some movie mogul’s posh mid-century home in the hills. I really want to believe. Because it’s just too perfect a movie not to have been made. (Are we sure we’ve checked everywhere?)
What makes this hole even more pronounced is that Peter Sellers played Clare Quilty in Stanley Kubrik’s 1962 production of Lolita (and then as the three leads in his 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). To have released a studio production of Pnin right around the same time would’ve been an epic moment in the history of filmmaking. Given that Nabokov, Kubrick, Sellers, and Edwards all existed within the zeitgeist of the period, I’m surprised it didn’t happen.
So again, if everyone up in Hollywood Hills could just take a little look-see behind their furniture, that would be great. But if we don’t find it, no worries. My imagination will be showing a private screening every time I re-read Nabokov’s Pnin. I’m not unhappy about this; it is, after all, previously unreleased Sellers.
- According to Nabokov, pronounced “up Nina” except the u and the a are silent ↩︎