Charles,
> VN must naturally have been totally familiar with Frost's rather gnomic essay, which prefaces his Collected Poems. It now seems to me to be an essential backdrop to the entire thrust of Pale Fire.
Yes, but probably is more correct to say, the backdrop of Pale Fire, the poem, rather then Pale Fire, the novel.
> Would a debate along these lines not be more profitable than trying to "solve" the book?
I think Boyd’s approach presented in ‘The magic of Artistic Discovery’ requires further deepening along this and other backdrops. Including, ‘The Gift’ itself. I am currently rereading it, in English this time, after coming across the proper origin (I think) of name of Gradus (‘degree’ in English) in the phrase highlighted in bold below. I was always enjoying the harmony of VN’s construction of PF but was missing unity of my understanding (as a programmer I can’t do without it). Names of Shade and Gradus remained unanswered. Factual dates of real events in PF stayed coincidental. To me PF slips away from any theory used to “solve” it, that I am familiar with. Not that it attempts to ‘solve’ the novel but I think that Pale Fire was designed to play out the artistic concept summed up by this phrase. In the end, the value of Shade’s creation would not be realized without illuminating effect of Kinbote’s Zembla, and dark corners of Botkin’s inner self would not be redeemed. The progress of Gradus in the Commetary makes the Sun/Shade reference complete. And that ‘degree’ / Gradus turned the key – for me. Also note echoes in PF of this jail and that gardener from the same paragraph. It is not a coincidence that English translation of ‘The Gift’ was revised and Pale Fire was completed in the same winter - of 1961 (I was lucky to be born in that winter). May be the book that Fyodor was dreaming to write and VN to complete in Russian came to fruition on English territory, in Pale Fire. What we then have is a novel projecting given artist’s view of his art – hard as it is but said and done in Pale Fire. And may be through Kinbote, in the end of Commentary, VN speaks of himself as “sans anything but his art” when we already know that Shade, Gradus and Kinbote are dead. The ideal arrangement, indeed.
Here it is, Koncheyev imagined by naked Fyodor in a black suited young German, in chapter 5:
“That’s it. All you’re concerned with is patrolling your body and trailing the sun. But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura. Sunlight is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade. A jail with no jailer and a garden with no gardener – that is I think the ideal arrangement. Tell me, did you read what I said about your book?”
- George Shimanovich