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On this month’s fiction podcast, Aleksandar Hemon reads and discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Pnin,” which was published in The New Yorker, in 1953, and became the opening chapter of his 1957 novel of the same name, about the Russian-émigré professor Timofey Pnin. Hemon, who relocated to the United States from the former Yugoslavia at the outset of the Bosnian war, and learned English in part by reading “Pnin” and other books by Nabokov, says that the author “is lauded for his language in English and Russian . . . but what is often misperceived is the actual care and insight he might have into his characters, particularly if they are displaced Russians.”

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