Some reasons to loathe Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's 1957 Pnin is a totally different kind of academic novel from the one I have posted on recently, Stoner - Nabokov's more of a comic satire profile of a hapless Russian emigre professor at an unnamed rural university who bumbles and stumbles through life, taken advantage of by his ex-wife, unable to find suitable campus housing, obsessive-compulsive to the nth degree, absent-minded of course, possibly brilliant in a limited sphere (Russian literature) but it's hard to ascertain whether he's brilliant or just obscure, working hard but not especially devoted to teaching or students, who are little more than a series of names, at least through the first half of the novel. What particularly strikes me aside from the humor - an amusing first segment in which Pnin gets on the wrong train en route to a lecture he's to deliver to a ladies' club, his occasional solecisms - is Nabokov's tone, typical of his work throughout but perhaps at a pinnacle in this novel: the underlying message seems to be that Pnin is a comic fool, a subject due for mockery, a man who'd had similar life experiences to VN unlike VN was unable to succeed at life, academics, literature (early exile from homeland for liberal politics, difficult sojourn in Europe, resettlement in the US, landing in an academic career - in VN's case it was at Cornell, and that's obviously the campus he's depicting here; and, apparently, despite the sly disclaimer at the outset that all characters are fiction etc. I think it's well-known that Pnin was modeled closely on a VN Cornell colleage) - and by setting up Pnin as a foil VN is continually reminding us that nobody is smarter than he, that as Pnin stumbles through American English VN is writing this gorgeous prose with occasional forays into Russian, German, French as well, that American's are crass and oafish, that America is devoid of culture and good will - not a word, not a moment of praise and gratitude for this country that took him and others in as refugees and not only tolerated them/him but enabled him to get a premiere teaching job, which he seems to have tolerated with a kind of noblesse oblige. How much of VN's personality can be explained by his passion for "collecting" butterflies? - probably the only pursuit of beauty that entails capture and killing of the object of attention.