Author David Bajo (The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, 2008) observes that in his novels there is no difference between reality and fiction because every book is inescapably autobiographic. I suppose he means that the author is a presence that can be "real" and "fictional" at the same time. I was led to think about Nabokov, how his presence may be felt in "Pale Fire," even when he isn't glaringly intruding in it as "someone in the know."

Would the July 17th assassination of the Imperial Family, which was extended to their personal servants and Dr. E.Botkin, have left a particular mark on him? We know that the avalanche of events, revolutions and wars barred Nabokov's return to Russia. Would there be any glimmer of them in "Pale Fire"? In this novel we encounter a sedentary Shade (who lost a daughter but who never moved away from his hometown and parental home for long) and a nomadic scholar, Botkin. This crazy exile, and his double Kinbote (creator of a fantasy Semblerland and a blundering death in Gradus), feels that he has lost a kingdom and that he, too, will soon be exterminated.

In "Pale Fire's" multiple mirrors, a familiar nabokovian project is presented, like those we find in "Speak, Memory" and in "Bend Sinister" where, in a quiet lamplit room, the author concludes that "everything is all right."* In this novel we come across a similar posture in Shade, when he describes a scene which he considers to have become an eternal triptych (through Art), before he adds, almost as an afterthought, that his dead daughter entertained a "mad hope" (contextually, the hope to move away from her father and mother, to find love and to marry - in her fictional earthly life, not in Shade's triptych)**. The word "hope" reappers when, after Shade's July 17th verses (describing his frustrated encounter with what had appeared to him a "twin display" - one that would confirm "eternity," not only through Art, but encompassing something rerlated to his earthly life) he states that a bungled information, a misprint, helped him to experience an external harmony which provided him with a "faint hope."

In "Bend Sinister's" fiction, Krug's small son was murdered by a blundering police, at the service of a vulgar tyrant, like frail Alexey, tended by the family doctor Kinbote, now in 'historical' Russia. Nabokov's next novel (and pale fire here, in my eyes, also suggests a "twin display" of light, as in Shade's verses), may belong to the same lineage, as "Invitation to a Beheading" and "Bend Sinister" should it be envisioned through a particular prism, i.e., the entire novel as consisting of serial fumbling bumbling blunders of all kinds - and more than one false azure skies and mirrors. ***

However, in "Pale Fire" Nabokov advances one more step. I believe that the author could have been attempting - through parody, inversions and distortions - to reproduce what he saw as the everlasting essence of ideal Russia shining out from it, inspite of its thousand deforming reflexes and gloomy spies. Shade's faint hope, accepting life's hidden patterns and plexed artistry, encompasses Hazel's and his own beliefs about a destiny that doesn't lie in the world of fiction: if Russia cannot to be preserved through his artistic achievements directly (Shade never writes the story of Zembla Kinbote hopes to encounter in his neighbor's divine poetry), the real fatherland, though, may yet shine like a sun, in its former majesty.

* - In Bend Sinister we find that 'someone is in the know' - a mysterious intruder...an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me...this deity experiences a pang of pity for his creature and hastens to take over. Krug, in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution...And as Olga's rosy soul, emblemized already, bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room, comfortably Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker..."

In Speak, Memory (Ch. 3,Vintage, 76/77) "A sense of security...pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumble bee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it shoud be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."

** - the point is that the three/Chambers, then bound by you and her and me,/Now form a tryptich or a three-act play/In which portrayed events forever stay.

... I think she always nursed a small mad hope. (379/383)

I argue that "Pale Fire" also carries "obvious affinities" with its two antecessors. For Nabokov 'Bend Sinister's' "choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world." Nabokov insists that he is "neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent...There can be distinguished...certain reflections in the glass directly caused by the idiotic and despicable regimes that...have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jackbooted baboons...where a certain dull-wittedness is a national trait of the people (augmenting thereby the possibilities of muddling and bungling so typical, thank God, of all tyrannies)...Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words...in Padukgrad, where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. The book teems with stylistic distortions, such as puns crossed with anagrams...spoonerisms...and of course the hybridization of tongues." )and many of the elements outlined for Padugrad (paronomasia, puns crossed with anagrams, spoonerisms, aso) are also to be found in the novel, "Pale Fire" (and in Hazel's speech disabilities with whom Kinbote himself feels a certain affinity?)

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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