Concerning the NYHT interview (for which many thanks, Matt Roth), I’m still trying to take on board VN’s calm assertion that “the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he Professor Kinbote. He is Professor Botkin…”  This has never seemed to me quite so simple.  Certainly it raises enormous narrative complications. As I wrote elsewhere, “Thorny questions abound: Is it Botkin with whom Shade is friendly, Botkin who flees to Utana with the manuscript of ‘Pale Fire’? Would that mean that all of Shade's and ‘Kinbote’'s give-and-take about Zembla recounted in the commentary is false? Has Botkin translated whatever actual relationship he had with Shade into a fictional version? Are we to understand that Botkin urged Shade to write a poem about Russia? That he wished to show him a photograph of the Royal Palace in Moscow? et cetera.” Or, as Brian Boyd put it, "The book is so steeped in Zembla that it is never quite resolvable whether it exists or not within the world of the book, so that a scene like Shade's public defense of Kinbote from identification as the ex-king of Zembla may or may not [my italics] blur the reality of what has happened in New Wye."  

I suggest that it would be a worthy project for Nabokovians to continue trying to resolve Boyd’s “may or may not.”  I’ve never been comfortable that Boyd (in his otherwise extraordinary book) was content to leave it at that.  If this is any help, here are the three basic alternatives I laid out:

“1) There is no ‘Zembla’ in the world of Pale Fire, no magazine articles about it, no acceptance of it in conversation among faculty members. Botkin is confabulating when he describes Shade's relationship with him in regard to ‘Zembla,’ for the place exists nowhere save in Botkin's fantasies, which he does not share with Shade or anyone else. We must substitute ‘Russia’ for ‘Zembla’ whenever the latter appears in the text in order to understand what Botkin and Shade are really talking about -- if, indeed, they talk about anything at all.

“2) Zembla is a real place in the world of Pale Fire, and Kinbote is saying and doing all the things he claims, except that he is known as V. Botkin, i.e., Zembla is real but ‘Charles Kinbote’ is not on the faculty of Wordsmith. The confabulation in the commentary consists in the use of the name ‘Charles Kinbote.’

“3) Zembla is real, and so too is Kinbote, in the sense that ‘Kinbote’ is a sustained delusion of a Russian faculty member, which delusion is inexplicably tolerated at Wordsmith, and encouraged by Shade.  Botkin lets it be known that he is ‘really’ Charles Kinbote, who is ‘really’ the exiled King of Zembla.”