- This chapter starts with a kind of weird passage about a king. Who is this King? Victor Wind's father. Well, not his real father. His real father is Eric Wind.
- But anyway, that's not important. What's important is the King has not abdicated. Instead, he chooses exile while looking at the picture of his dead wife.
- Of course, Victor's mom isn't dead. She's just divorcing from his dad to marry some guy named Church in Buffalo. But you know, whatever gets Victor to go to sleep.
- Anyway, even though he knows it's not true, Victor thinks of these stories every night to help himself go to sleep. The fantasies were probably based in the real stories his parents told him of fleeing from Lenin's regime, but now they're nothing more than fairytales in Victor's kind of strange imagination.
- About Victor: he's 14, but looks a bit older, and is lanky and tall. He's condescending towards his mom and hates his dad. Oh, and he has some kind of weird fantasy where Pnin is some kind of scholarly genius with a mysterious charm. Definitely in delusion-ville.
- Here's the thing about Victor: his parents think there's something wrong with him. Now, we're not saying that there's actually anything wrong with Victor. For all we know, he's an artistic genius. But Eric and Liza Wind are troubled by the nonconformity of their son. They give him every psychiatry test in the book, and he manages to subvert them all. After a while they just give up.
- So at 12 years old, Victor is sent to St. Bartholomew's Catholic school. He hates everyone there except for one guy, an art professor named Lake. Who is, by the way, a little crazy.
- Inspired by him, Victor attempts to paint a car in a way that seems like you would never recognize it. Definitely the inspiration of an eccentric.
- There could be a lot of ways to explain Victor's demeanor, but we'll make it really easy for you. He's a hipster artist. He makes silly references and attempts to imitate long-gone art trends because he thinks they're so much cooler than the ones around today. If only he had a flannel shirt and some oversized glasses.
- Back to Pnin. The day before Victor arrives, he goes to a shop and buys a football. Not an American football, of course, but what most Americans would call a soccer ball. After getting this and The Son of the Wolf by Jack London, Pnin is totally ready for Victor's arrival. Or would be, if Victor were a few years younger. And also, he's going to be 24 hours late.
- Turns out that he was caught with five other boys smoking cigars in the attic. Not that Victor, good little hipster that he is, was actually smoking, but he was with all the other boys when they were caught.
- He finally gets to Waindell and the first thing Pnin does is take him to a diner in the middle of the rain. They don't have a conversation exactly, since Pnin talks on and on about the pronunciation of his name, Russian literature, and other stuff that a 14-year-old hipster probably has no interest in.
- After learning the unfortunate truth that Victor has no interest in football (soccer), Pnin takes him home. There, Victor politely opens and praises the gifts that Pnin got him. But this scene doesn't last very long because the moment Victor yawns, Pnin calls it a night.
- The next few paragraphs are all descriptions of the four men in the house sleeping. Nothing much happens, but it's very pretty to read.