Betwixt St. Petersburg and Waindell: Liminal Nostalgia and Butterfly-like Dwelling in Nabokov’s Pnin

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2026

[PDF]

Betwixt St. Petersburg and Waindell: Liminal Nostalgia and Butterfly-like Dwelling in Nabokov's Pnin

Zehuan Feng

ABSTRACT:

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), the protagonist Timofey Pnin inhabits a state of perpetual
suspension between the irrecoverable past of St. Petersburg and the unassimilable present of Waindell
College. This liminality manifests not only in physical spaces such as trains, cars, and the university
campus, but also within the linguistic tension between Pnin’s forced use of accented English and his deep
attachment to his Russian mother tongue; it is precisely upon these spatial and linguistic borders that
nostalgia is rendered as a state of affective liminality, plunging Pnin into a realm of “in-betweenness”
where the inherent melancholy of nostalgic displacement meets the tragicomic uncertainty of the exilic
present. Despite this inescapable tragic fate of the Russian émigré condition, the novel’s open-ended, “on
the road” finale demonstrates how Nabokov transforms exile into a mode of resistance through a
proactive embrace of the nostalgic liminality. Thus, nostalgia becomes not merely a eulogy for the “lost
paradise”, but a Nabokovian butterfly-like dwelling that reconfigures the trauma of displacement into a
nomadic, existential aesthetic of freedom.

Keywords: Nostalgia, Liminality, Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, Butterfly Imagery