Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 6 March, 2025

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood fit when he felt distributed through space and time and says that his foot was upon a mountaintop: 

 

                                A thread of subtle pain,

Tugged at by playful death, released again,

But always present, ran through me. One day,

When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay

Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy -

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 6 March, 2025

Describing King Alfin’s death in an aviation accident, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the angels who netted King Alfin's mild pure soul:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 5 March, 2025

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about his daughter's tragic death and quotes her words "I'd be de trop:" 

 

I'd finished recently my book on Pope.

Jane Dean, my typist, offered her one day

To meet Pete Dean, a cousin. Jane's fiancé

Would then take all of them in his new car

A score of miles to a Hawaiian bar.

The boy was picked up at a quarter past

Eight in New Wye. Sleet glazed the roads. At last

They found the place - when suddenly Pete Dean

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 3 March, 2025

According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), in a conversation with him and Shade Mrs. Hurley mentioned the old man at the Exton railway station who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains:

 

Line 629: The fate of beasts

Above this the poet wrote and struck out:

The madman’s fate

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 2 March, 2025

In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes Shade's poem “The Nature of Electricity,” which appeared in the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly after the poet's death:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 2 March, 2025

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that now he will speak of evil as none has spoken before and itemizes the things that he loathes:

 

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;