2014-12-02
54 分钟Aleksandar Hemon joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pnin,” from a 1953 issue of the magazine.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear Vladimir Nabokov's story Pnin, which was published in the New Yorker in 1953.
Now a secret must be imparted.
Professor Pnin was on the wrong train.
He was unaware of it, and so was the conductor.
The story was chosen by Alexander Hamann, whose own fiction and nonfiction have been appearing in the magazine since 1999.
His most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles, was published in 2009.
Hi, Sasha.
Hi, Deborah.
You've said somewhere, I don't know where, that you learned English by reading Nabokov.
And it seems safe to me to say that he's been very important to you as a fiction writer as well.
Why do you feel such an affinity with his work?
I loved Nabokov before I ended up in the United States.
I still distinctly remember the place on the shelf from which I picked Lolita in the local library.
So when I came to the United States and was trying to find a way to write in English, I undertook a project of reading and rereading books in English.
And Nabokov was at the top of the list.
And so I would read Lolita and many of his other books and stories, and I would underline words that I didn't know at first, but there were so many that I started making lists of words to look them up later in the Oxford Dictionary for an advanced learner that I had brought.
So I continued reading many other books, not just Nabokov, but Nabokov was the target, as it were, the beacon, rather, that I measured my progress or regress against.