The first wave of Russian emigration refers to the mass exodus of those who fled Russia during and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war that followed. Historians’ estimates of the total number of people vary widely, from roughly 900,000 to nearly 2 million, depending on the years and territories counted. This migration involved a disproportionate share of the intellectual and cultural elite of Russia, such as writers, scholars, and artists. They left their homeland and settled in Paris, Berlin, and Prague, where they worked to preserve pre-revolutionary Russian culture in exile. Vladimir Nabokov belonged to this generation. His family fled Russia in 1919 and he spent the next two decades in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1940.

Professor Timofey Pnin is an archetype of this displaced intellectual class. His life story mirrors the historical trajectory of many émigrés: “after escaping from Leninized Russia and completing his college education in Prague, [he] had spent fifteen years” (8) in Paris before arriving in America. This background explains his deep nostalgia, his scholarly devotion to Russian literature, and his social circle of fellow exiles, who meet at places like Cook’s Castle to discuss Russian history and émigré writers. The first wave included luminaries such as Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, both of whom, like Pnin, had to rebuild careers and reputations from scratch in unfamiliar cities. Pnin’s existence, defined by a constant negotiation between a preserved past and an “unpredictable America” (13), embodies the collective experience of a generation of stateless scholars and artists who carried their culture with them. Most, unlike Nabokov, never found comparable success or fluency in their adopted language.