Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings after a storm in the middle of the night had paralyzed the local power station. The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge. leaving him with two identical pieces, which he would vaguely attempt to unite, in the hope, pehaps, of some organic marvel of restoration coming to the rescue. The zipper a gentleman depends on most would come loose in his puzzled hand at some nightmare moment of haste and despair.

Bart, Mitty,
Well, thinking about it -- doing hairpin turn here, with screeching tires -- the scene with him trying to make sure he has the correct manuscript in the correct place for his lecture does seem somewhat obsessive and compulsive, especially when he just can't resist checking, and rechecking, and reshuffling, as I recall. Maybe my memory exaggerates, but that could well qualify. In general though, that scene is not quite characteristic of what seems to me to be a more resigned kind of determinedly bumbling nature -- otherwise we might all be absolutely frantic by novel's end.

If that had been a continious pattern, it could have been mild OCD, but in this instance, just a case of nerves, and after all he is a methodical sort of person. JMO

At the beginning of October, Nabokov howled in pain at the projected cover illustration for the book, and sent all the instructions and photographs he could to ensure that the person on the cover would be his Pnin...

I have just received the sketches. They are executed with talent, the picture as art goes is first-rate, but in regard to my Pnin it is wrong: The sketch looks like the portrait of an underpaid instructor in the English department or like a Republican's notion of a defeated Adlai, when actually he should look like a Russian muzhik clean-shaven. I am sending you some photographs of Pnin-like Russians, with and without hair, for a visual appreciation of the items I am going to discuss.

The cover that Marj posted at the front of the thread is only one of several I have seen, but Nabokov was not satisfied with any of them. He had very definite ideas about how Timofey should look. Brian Boyd, in VN: The American Years says...
Partially...

Pnin told Madam Shpolyanski he would follow her in a minute, and after she had gone he continued to sit in the first dusk of the arbor, his hands clasped on the croquet mallet he still held.
Two kerosene lamps cozily illuminated the porch of the country house. Dr. Pavel Antonovich Pnin, Timofey's father an eye specialist, and Dr. Yakov Grigorievich Belochkin, Mira's father, a pediatrician, could not be torn away from their chess game in a corner of the veranda, so Madam Belochkin had the maid serve them there--on a special small Japanese table, near the one they were playing at--their glasses of tea in silver holders, the curd and whey with black bread, the Garden Strawberries, zemlyanika, and the other cultivated species, klubnika (Hautbois or Green Strawberries), and the radiant golden jams, and the various biscuits, wafers, pretzels, zwiebacks--instead of calling the two engrossed doctors to the main table at the other end of the porch, where sat the rest of the family and guests, some clear, some grading into a luminous mist. .....................The country house that the Belochkins rented that summer was in the same Baltic resort near which the widow of General N---- let a summer cottage to the Pnins on the confines of her vast estate, marshy and rugged, with dark woods hemming in a desolate manor. Timofey Pnin was again the clumsy, shy, obstinate, eighteen-year-old boy, waiting in the dark for Mira--and despite the fact that logical thought put electric bulbs into the kerosene lamps and reshuffled the people, turning them into aging émigrés and securely, hopelessly, forever wire-netting the lighted porch, my poor Pnin, with hallucinatory sharpness, imagined Mira slipping out of there into the garden and coming toward him among tall tobacco flowers whose dull white mingled in the dark with that of her frock. This feeling coincided somehow with the sense of diffusion and dilation within his chest. Gently he laid his mallet aside and to dissipate the anguish, started walking away from the house, through the silent pine grove.

BTW Whiskey, I'm bushla over there.