Part I: Thesis

Despite the resistance a good problem must have to easy solution, others must be able to solve it, or it is a failure … The relationship between composer and solver is fundamentally a generous one: the composer invited the solver as close to creative equality as the difference in their role allows.

drawing from Nabokov's corpus, Brian Boyd his biographer, in conjunction with many critics and Nabokov's son Dimitri delivers what Boyd would deem to be a definitive interpretation of Pale Fire, a work which the rest of the world views as a post modern ambivalence.

Pale Fire is arguably more enjoyable as a puzzle than e.g. Ulysses because the challenges are local:

He spaces and grades his challenges, so that we can handle enough of them to continue at speed, so that we can solve enough to want to look out for more, but so that we do not even suspect the deeper problems until we are well on the way to becoming expert solvers.

This tips his hand to being an export composer

He plants only one cross reference within the Foreword, in the hope that we shall have the energy to follow this one trail. If we do not follow it at all –and most readers seem not to– he still primed our curiosity in many ways essential to the unfolding story.

I recall following this trail which immediately tipped me off to the fact that I was at an inflection point in my appreciation of literature in general.

the last paragraph of the foreword instructs us to read the commentary thrice, in duplicate, before beginning the poem

Shade’s ability to counterpoint sound and sense

Unlike Kinbote’s readers, though, Nabokov’s are invited to make their own uneasy and surprising discoveries demand no infinite Borgesian library–just a good dictionary [Webster’s 2nd, Wallace preferred OED], a complete Shakespeare, and curiosity, memory, imagination. What we can find in the Commentary depends less on the esoterica of the erudite than simply on an alert assessment of human behavior and character

this man who thinks himself in a unique position to present Shade’s poem, seems to understand neither his own role as commentator nor the man he claims his friend

Climactic convergence of the three storylines, foreshadowed but not betrayed, comes to a head in the note to line 1000 which is not cross referenced by any other notes.

explains how Kinbotes whole story hinges on his importance as Charles’s II of zembla, which in turn is contingent on his assassin Gradus, who is revealed to be none other than a disgruntled asylum escapee, come to seek vengeance on Kinbote’s landlord who happens to look like Shade.

This in together with all the other commentary indicates that Konnor’s exhibits all three forms of paranoia in its classical forms: delusions of grandeur, erotic fantasies of being loved sexually by another, and persecution mania.

inspiration for PF came from his translation of Pushkin’s Onegin which had similar proportions as PF and was accomplished as a 10 year endeavor between Lolita and PF.

In PF he tried to create for his readers something of the same magic of discovery he had felt in exploring Eugene Onegin

I must also add that I, who devoted many hours of additional research after turning the last page of my first read through, felt as though I had likely milked the majority of substantive revelation and hidden narrative out of PF was delighted and aghast to see it all summarized in Part I of Boyd’s commentary. Before any rereading or re-reading, implying that there’s damn near 2/3s more substance to be had out of my favorite book.

I tabled Boyd and reached for Botkin.

Part II: Antithesis

Russian birth, English education, Scandinavian situation, sexual indiscretion, panicky flight - explain Botkin’s past

Emerald::Izumrudov prof H/C :: Niagarin/Andromnikov MS :: jewels Cedarn :: Kobaltana

Flatman a royal loyalist, glazing Charles II of GB.

suicide like Iris, attributable to the Shadows, but Kinbote being zemblan for regicide.

Nabokov confirmed that the the Foreword is Kinbote's suicide note.

Because Pale Fire already offers so much in both poem, commentary, and the gap between them—the contrast between Shade's control and Kinbote's chaos, Shade's fulfillment and Kinbote's desperation, Shade's readiness to step outside himself in imagination and Kinbote's compulsion to impose himself on his world-and in the further and deeply poignant gap between Shade's confidence in what is to come and the rude shock of his death, many astute readers like Alter and Pifer feel there is no need to explore further.

Kinbote can't be the the sole author of the poem + commentary for he admits he can’t rhyme and wouldn’t need Shade to commemorate Zembla at all. similarly, arguments for Shadeans fall apart:

Perhaps a more potent argument, advanced by David Lodge, is that as a novelist himself he cannot imagine Shade transmuting into poignant autobiographical art the tragedy of his daughter's death only then to offset it against the crazy invention of Kinbote." In Pale Fire Nabokov himself transforms his own father's killing into the shambolic farce of Shad's death, and in the margins of his autobiography he turns his father's death into a kind of cosmic chess game;

part II lays out the analysis and main camps better than anything J could find online

Part III: Synthesis

you got POEMS you got RUSSIA you got EMIGRE you got UNRELIABLE NARRATOR you got PEDOPHILE you got CHESS you got BUTTERFLIES it’s really the quintessential Nabokov.

HOLY FUCK

Nabokov is a master problemist on the chessboard as on the page. He compares one of his chess problems to an artistic problem in his early novel Glory, but it seems an even closer analogy to what he has designed here in Pale Fire:

The result reminds me of a chess problem I once composed. Its beauty lay in a paradoxical first move: the White Queen had four likely squares at its disposal but on any of these it would be in the way (such a powerful piece-and "in the way"!) of one of White's Knights in four mating variants; in other words, being an absolutely useless spoilsport and burden on the board, with no part whatever in any of the subsequent play, it had to exile itself to a neutral corner behind an inert pawn and remain wedged there in idle obscurity. Sybil as the Vanessa is in a sense the White Queen blocking the solution of Shade's and the reader's problem. We have to realize she is not herself a force in the solution, but that if Hazel is as it were promoted to Queen (a legitimate step in chess, of course, if a pawn reaches the opposing end),20 she can now take after her mother in death as she could not in life, she now can play the part of the Vanessa. There can be two White Queens, two Vanessas on the board at the same time, and it is the second, not the first, that makes possible the key move that leads to the

The butterfly on the OG cover:

Hazel's role in Kinbote's life suggests that after he succumbs to his temptation to suicide, after he figuratively takes the tunnel a third time to Iris Acht's room, they may share a singular kind of companionship, the woman who took her life because she felt herself pushed to the margins of her world, and the man she allows a rich fantasy of himself at the center of his world, until reality catches up with him again and he too seeks in death an ultimate escape. Kinbote may discover that even though Shade could not take the interest in his life that he wanted, his daughter could: someone else who had found life lonely, difficult, unhappy, someone who now from the beyond has allowed him to live a little longer, while he imagines himself central to his world, and who has made him central in hers. And when he discovers that, it might make all the difference.

Nabokov holds Hamlet to be “probably the greatest miracle in all literature”

Hazel dies in Lake Omega, but as if to testify that death is not the last letter of life, she seems with the help of her own grandparents to turn Alphina Goldsworth into Alfin the Vague in Kinbote's mind, and Alfin in turn into the opening line of Shade's poem, the image of the waxwing

Shade winds up being quite the allusive poet:

Unlike [T.S. Eliot of Four Quartets], Shade integrates his allusions [to Eliot] into a consistent narrative context that poignantly augments the ironies

“no self-styled / Spirit” followed immediately by a rapping at the glass a year following Hazel’s death + through Kinbote’s insistence on the mountain escape which echoes the opening lines of waxwing slain

Reversing Eliot's name in that line of her father's, Hazel's spirit signals that throughout "Pale Fire" she prompts her father to reflect, re-verse, and outshine the "Four Quartets" that brought them together one rare night while she still lived.

Gradus ad Parnassum - a dictionary of prosody, poetical phrases, aid to latin versification; also title to John Fux’s 1725 treatise on musical counterpoint.

Stillicide coming from a Hardy poem (Friend's Beyond) about hearing voices from a local cemetery, but Kinbote can’t name it…

Allusions as well to the acrostic from his own The Vane Sisters, foreshadowing the significance of such acrostics and even reusing the name Sybil.

Gradus always flying + Gradus’ plane from Copenhagen looks like a Red Admirable.

Hazel dead, Shade dead, Kinbote dead. Sybil, Emerald, Gradus alive - much to think about

Shade's characteristic images and structures determine Gradus's outline-the contrapuntal rhythm, the pane-pain patterns that fix his profession, the flight imagery that establishes his trajectory-but nothing impinges on Kinbote's freedom to fill it in as he wishes. Shade offers him a chance to extend himself, to step outside himself as he plays a game of worlds with Gradus, but Kinbote fails to carry on the chain of generosity. Unlike Shade, always searching for ways to transcend himself, Kinbote remains comically, insufferably, pricelessly his selfish self-and we would not want a world where he could not remain so, no matter how little we might wish him for a neighbor—as he uses his freedom only to gloat at Gradus's limits and to glory in his own power to surpass them.

+other implications of Shade communicating his acknowledgement of Zembla & thus the comprehensive Kinbote through Kinbote’s own descriptions of Gradus which Kinbote pens and fails to pick up on himself

After writing his most luminous lines, Shade dies and discovers in these very lines the signs that he has himself been directed by forces beyond him, yet discovers also that this allows him to control things in a richer way than before, and to do so by allowing Kinbote to shape things in turn in a way richer than he ever has. If this pattern in any way reflects how things really are and this is the implication of Shade's discovery of a deeper truth behind life and death—would this not suggest that Nabokov in his turn, in shaping Shade, finds his own moves made by forces beyond him? Or is the possibility that our world forms part of a cascade of worlds within worlds more metafiction than metaphysics, reflecting not so much life, or what lies behind it, as the mere inclinations of ingenious art?

related