Nabokov

Cycnos |Nabokov and the Campus Novel

Vladmir Nabokov's /Pnin/, (1955) is, in one of its many aspects, a very early example of the “campus novel”, written and published before that subgenre of modern literary fiction was identified and named. In /Pale Fire/ (1962) Nabokov returned to the university campus for the principal location of his story. I will try to identify the specific nature of Nabokov's contribution to the evolution of the campus novel and his possible influence on other practitioners of this kind of fiction.