From the Publisher
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The urbane authority that Vladimir
Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic
amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and
politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression
than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and
popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary
figure.An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and
learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of
deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem
written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death.
Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented
scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis
with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in
pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly
inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary
one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of
things in literature-perfect tragicomic balance.With an
Introduction by Richard Rorty
From the Jacket
"This centaur-work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect
beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth.
Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is
one of the great works of art of this century." -Mary McCarthy,
The New Republic
"As a literary tour de force it surpasses anything else Mr. Nabokov
has done." -Atlantic Monthly
"Scintillating, brilliantly inventive…[Pale Fire] has
almost as many layers of meaning as an artichoke has petals."
-Commonwealth
"Of all [Nabokov's] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest,
the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God's
earth." -New York Herald Tribune
"A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work . . . done with
dazzling skill." -Time
"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is,
ecstatically." -John Updike
About the Author
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St.
Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture
and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an
outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the
opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik
revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was
shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to
shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was
already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he
studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge,
taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he
lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under
the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations,
lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword
puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he
had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee
once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the
United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell.
He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in
English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private
tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody''s
concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled,
rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand
of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror,
the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and
traditions-which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can
magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317]
Yet Nabokov''s American period saw the creation of what are
arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947),
Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale
Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian
novels into English. He also undertook English translations of
works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of
criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Hardcover
336 Pages, 5.22 x 8.3 x 0.87 IN
March 10, 1992
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
English
0679410775
9780679410775