This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear Vladimir Nabokov's story, Pinin, which was published in the New Yorker in 1953.

Now a secret must be imparted.

Professor Pin was on the wrong train.

He was unaware of it, and so was the conductor.

The story was chosen by Alexander Hemman, whose own fiction and nonfiction have been appearing in the magazine since 1999.

His most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles, was published in 2009.

Hi Sasha.

Hi Debra.

You've said somewhere, I don't know where, that you learned English by reading Nabokov.

And it seems safe to me to say that he's been very important to you as a fiction writer as well.

Why do you feel such a nafinity with his work?

I loved Nabokov before I ended up in the United States.

I still distinctly remember the place on the shelf from which I picked Lolita in a local library.

So when I came to the United States and was trying to find a way to write an English,

I undertook a project of reading and rereading books in English and Nabokov was at the top of the list.

And so I would read Lolita and many of his other books and stories and I would underline

words that I didn't know at first, but there were so many that I saw making lists of words to look them up later

in the Oxford dictionary for an advanced learner that I had brought.

So I continued reading many other books, not just Nabokov, but Nabokov was a target as it were.

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