The Beer

A Russian Imperial Stout pairs perfectly with Nabokov, a Russian emigre whose calling cards are his ridiculously precise vocabulary and epic sentences that pile clause upon clause upon clause. To match the intensity of Nabokov’s prose, you need an absolutely huge beer. Only an imperial, a barleywine, or an eisbock could live up to Nabokov, and Nabokov’s heritage makes a Russian Imperial Stout the obvious choice. It’s also fitting that stouts are dark beers, since Pnin, though funny, is also incredibly sad. Every time I picked the slim book up, I thought of the titular character, “Poor Pnin.”

Old Rasputin would be the classic choice for a Russian Imperial Stout, but I went another direction for two reasons. 1) I’m still salty that I missed Old Rasputin on the style section of the tasting portion of my Cicerone exam. 2) Jackie O’s original brewer, Brad Clark, leaves the brewery this week, after thirteen years with the brewery. So let’s go with Jackie O’s Russian Imperial Stout, Dark Apparition, especially because Jackie O’s website says that “Russian Imperial Stouts are one of brewmaster Brad Clark’s favorite styles of beer and Dark Apparition is without a doubt his favorite beer to brew.”

I picked this bottle up when a colleague and I visited Jackie O’s as the leaves were changing last Fall. It’s 10% ABV, so the beer is none the worse for wear. It pours pitch black with a lovely tan head that dissipates pretty quickly. It’s opaque and it’s got legs, hinting at the alcohol and chewiness that you’ll get when you dive in. On the nose, loads of dark chocolate and raisin. On the tongue, like Raisinets that are balanced toward the chocolate rather than the raisin. The chocolate is dark, maybe even unsweetened chocolate. There’s a lot of bitterness at the end, either from heavy hopping or roasted barley, I’m not sure. The mouthfeel, I think, is the best part of an Imperial Stout, and Dark Apparition doesn’t disappoint. On first sip, you feel the high ABV warming your mouth. It’s super chewy and finishes very sweet, not dry at all.

I paired it with a dense chocolate cookie from local bakery Pistacia Vera. The chocolate harmonizes with and matches the intensity of Dark Apparition. Dark Apparition also matches the intensity of Nabokov’s prose - but the beer suits the book because it provides contrast rather than complement. The beer’s decidedly sweet finish couldn’t be more different from Pnin, a book in which absolutely everything ends bitterly. Get yourself some Dark Apparition before you dive into this sadly comic novella.

The Book

No one else writes like Nabokov - even when he’s writing in not his first language (Russian), nor his second (French), but his third language, English. Check out this physical description of Professor Timofey Pnin:

Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flanneled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet. (7)

The juxtaposition here is startling: Pnin’s body dwindles as the meandering sentence unravels. Right here, in the novel’s second sentence, is all we need to know about the story of Pnin; his physical description is a metaphor for the sad, withering trajectory of his life.

Such devolution recurs throughout the book - sentences begin brightly but end with incredible poignancy, chapters start happily and end with stunning heartbreak. Like I said, “Poor Pnin.” Even the Russian childhood for which Pnin is nostalgic isn’t great (though in comparison with his diminishing prospects and hateful colleagues at Waindell College, it seems brighter - which makes Pnin’s life even sadder).

Chapter 3 opens with this heart-breaker:

During the eight years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings--for one reason or another, mainly sonic--about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody. (62)

That last clause just slays me. We start the chapter by talking about Pnin’s relocations. Then we’re in a furniture store, as a snowfall and dusk hush the city outside. It’s all kind of lovely and innocuous.

But NO: in the end, NOBODY REALLY LOVES ANYBODY. Nobody really loves anybody. Geesh. This is when I knew Pnin was doomed.

Nabokov plays at this unraveling on a larger scale, too - at the level of the chapter. In one of the few lovely moments in Pnin, Pnin visits a childhood friend and other Russian emigres at the friend’s country house, Cook’s Castle. It’s a moment of familiarity in a strange land, a reconnection to childhood, and an idyll away from what plagues Pnin at Waindell College.

A woman there remembers Pnin as a young adult, recalling that they both new a Mira Belochkin. Pnin shrugs this off in the moment, but at the end of the chapter, alone, he allows himself to remember Mira, his first love. The narrator explains why Pnin has not allowed himself to remember Mira: “not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind [...], but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible” (135). Pnin knows that Mira died in a concentration camp, but he doesn’t know how, exactly, and so:

Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.

Pnin ends his day thinking of Mira, as the chapter ends: “Pnin walked slowly under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. (136)

In the end, the book seems to end with a note of hope for Pnin, but… who knows, since Nabokov has taught us throughout the book, again and again, that even that which seems to start hopefully - or at least innocuously - ultimately comes to nothing: it ends with a dwindling body, a snowy dusk where no one really loves anybody, a democracy of ghosts.

The sweet finish of Dark Apparition may be some consolation through all this; if not, then at least the elevated ABV may have you feeling better than Pnin’s sad life will render you. If neither of those console, we can think of how lucky we readers are that Nabokov immigrated to the States and gave us all these beautiful books, and how lucky we’ve been that Brad Clark worked with Jackie O’s for thirteen years and gave us all those beautiful beers.