Pale Fire

Considered the highest artistic achievement of Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962) was written in a complex form that satirizes academic literary analysis and has two fictitious authors: a mad professor named Charles Kinbote and a poet named John Shade. The poem Pale Fire by Shade, of 999 lines, is explicated in a commentary by Kinbote, and, when read together, the story of the poet and his family are merged with the fantastical lives of his critic, perhaps an exiled king and perhaps an assassin. Readers of the novel will be intrigued by its puzzles, amused by its wild humor, moved by its profundity, and struck by its beauty and brilliance. We solved by internal evidence one of the mysteries of the book by establishing for the first time the lineation of the poem so that the small volume conforms to the set of index cards described as its manuscript in the novel.