Reading Pale Fire: Note by Note

For those who have only read Pale Fire
from the first page to the last, I'd very much
suggest trying to read following the instructions
Kinbote leaves in the text.  Of course it gives a
sense of Kinbote's obsessive mind, brooding
over slights which can never be redressed, lost
paradises and missed opportunities - as well
as a certain playfulness which can not be
dismissed - but although Kinbote is the one
giving the instructions, progressing through
the work using his instructions, e.g., see note to
line 919, as a road map also defeats him in the end.

Kinbote makes a point that the commentator
gets the last word, but I defy any two readers
(or even any one re-reader twice )to take the exact
same journey through the notes.  It's too
complicated.  There are too many ambiguities.
No two readings will always return to the
same place after all the departures.

Although Nabokov believed fervently in
rereading books, once you start following
the notes, you'll never read the exact same
Pale Fire twice.  (Support me here,
Heraclitus!)  Inevitably the final word will
be shared - between Nabokov and the
sympathetic reader.

Pale Fire: V. Sirin's Dream Life

V.                                                                                    S.

If Pnin seems to be asking its reader to uncritically enjoy
a few stretches of time spent in Pnin's company, Pale
Fire invites, almost compels interpretation.   Its many
layers, its various ways of reading, its multiple narrators
all suggest complexity.

I wonder if on a much simpler level Pale Fire isn't also
Nabokov's attempt to deal with the sense of unreality his
earlier life must have come to hold for him ensconced
in the academic wilds of New England.

Of course Nabokov's father was killed by a real
assassin's bullet; but one must wonder if there were not
times when Nabokov's memories of a Tsarist-tinged
social order  -  from the estate at Rozhdestveno which
belonged to him for less than year to his father's death
in the futile tumult of Russian emigre politics in Berlin -
came to seem as unreal to him as Kinbote's musings on
his friendship with John Shade or as dream-like as a
deposed king's memory of ruling and
fleeing an imaginary kingdom called Zembla.

V.                                                                           N.