I don’t want to recapitulate my whole argument, but may I just ask about one detail in Pale Fire which seems typically pointed and which no one else seems to account for?

Now Pippa Passes is about a young woman, Pippa, who influences four people in major ways without their recognizing it.

And this note shows Hazel obsessed with what she takes to be the ghostly light in the Haunted Barn. When the Shades visit, the light does not oblige. But Nabokov goes out of his way, again, to have Kinbote visit Jane Provost and get from her a typescript recording Hazel’s jottings from the barn (all highly improbable “realistically,” a fact deftly obscured by this master teller of great fairy tales),

Now this same note also ends with a poem by Shade, “The Nature of Electricity,”  where Shade playfully imagines ghosts as the forces behind electric lights: “And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole Town with innumerable lights,” and streetlight number 999, perhaps, “is an old friend of mine.” Shade writes a 999-line poem with a title drawn from Shakespeare’s phrase about the moon, our biggest night light, snatching her “pale fire” from the sun;

his home town has all the trees in Shakespeare along a famous avenue,

and Kinbote, who does not know where “pale fire” comes from in Shakespeare, reports Charles II escaping by an underground passage with insistent underworld overtones that goes under Coriolanus Lane (“lane” being the last word of “Pale Fire”) and Timon Alley (Timon of Athens being the play in which the phrase “pale fire” occurs).

Nabokov has exerted the full resources of his imagination to coordinate such things: the uninterpreted message from a ghostly light in the haunted barn; Shade’s writing a poem about ghostly lights, including Shakespeare and a ghost in streetlamp 999; the underworld and Shakespeare in Onhava and the Shakespearean trees in New Wye; and the atalanta that visits Shade after he finishes 999 and unknowingly ignores the message in the haunted barn as he walks across the lane to his death.

Now why does Nabokov also link into this note on the Haunted Barn the allusion to Browning’s Pippa Passes and the doubled allusion there to inspiration (Browning getting his inspiration for the poem as he walks through Dulwich Forest, Pippa inspiring people who do not realize they have been inspired by her)?

Will it have nothing to do with the daughter whom Shade introduces into his poem by referring to “the phantom of my little daughter’s swing” and then by Sybil greeting “her ghost,” and who in this very note shows her own obsession with the ghostly, and actually records what we and the Nabokovs, but no mortal within the novel, can read as a prophetic ghostly message?

Kinbote, comically, although he imagines an Onhava with a Timon Alley, and a Charles the Beloved who carries a copy of Timon Afinsken through the underground-underworld passage to his escape, cannot recognize the source of the Shakespearean phrase “pale fire.” He also names for us, in the note (C.998) immediately following the extraordinary description of the atalanta flitting around Shade just moments before his death (C.993-995), the trees he recognizes in “the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare” (C.47-48). There are many kinds of trees in Shakespeare other than those Kinbote recognizes, but it is surely interesting that in this particular location he provides the evidence that he does not recognize the hazel that features in The Taming of the Shrew.

(And that just after the initial mention of “the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare” in C.47-48 comes the phrase “the hint of a haze.”)

discovering new surprises as I write this, and leaving more I have just noticed for another time.