Pnin is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1957.

The book follows a Russian-born professor named Timofey Pavlovich Pnin living in the United States. It was published in installments in The New Yorker in order to generate income while Nabokov was scouring the United States for a Publisher willing to publish Lolita. On the surface, an entirely satisfactory surface, the resulting "novel" deals with the profound and nightmarish displacements of 20th Century history with supremely civilized humor and tolerance. Upon closer reading, Pnin reveals itself to be an early Nabokovian meditation on time, memory and and the complexities of narrative. The book's narrator, who bears many similarities to Nabokov—an aristocratic Russian emigree past, the same surnames as the author, as well as the final initial N—gradually reveals himself as a less than disinterested observer. By the final chapter, he has completely taken over and becomes the central character. Pnin is only glimpsed fleeing the scene that the narrator has appropriated.

In several earlier scenes, Pnin called the veracity of the narrator into question, and oddly, for an almost uniformly benevolent character, seems to bear malice towards him. As presented by the narrator, those outbursts seem to be no more than evidence of Pnin's quirky nature. But the final words of the book open up delirious new possibilities; they are the spoken words of yet another Pnin "observer" and they disconcertingly leave the reader with an entirely different, and crueller version of the Vladimir Vladimirovich N. narrator's conclusion to the events of Chapter One. We remember that the narrator, back in Chapter One, was disappointed by the prosaically benign conclusion of those events, claiming to hate happy endings. Now a new narrator seems to have provided him with a more satisfactorily unhappy conclusion to those events. But as we only have, V.V.N.'s by-now highly-suspect testimony to vouch for the words of the new narrator, we're left to wonder if the new happily-unhappy version was ever spoken, or if V.V.N is simply editing an earlier text of his own devising with which he's grown increasingly dissatisfied. The possibility presents itself that Pnin, vanished from the University without forwarding address, and replaced by V.V.N is no more than the novelist narrator's invention—a character for a novel. However, Pnin materializes out of the void into which he has disappeared—not in this text, but in Nabokov's later novel Pale Fire (1962).