Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com Pale Fire INTRODUCTION ever written. BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV HISTORICAL CONTEXT Vladimir Nabokov was born the first of five children in a Pale Fire’s narrator, Charles, tells of the Russia of his childhood, wealthy family of Russian nobility. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir a “different Russia” that rejected tyranny and inequality, which Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a lawyer and journalist, and his is a reference to Russia prior to the Russian Revolution. The mother, Yelena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, was the heiress of a Russian Revolution began in 1917, when the monarchy was successful gold mine. Nabokov enjoyed a privileged childhood abolished, and the Russian Provisional Government seized on his family’s Saint Petersburg estate, and he developed an control of the country based on the interests of wealthy early love for literature and writing. Nabokov published his first capitalists and aristocrats. Working class militias known as book of poems, Stikhi (“Poems”), in 1916 when he was just 17 Soviets sprang up and opposed the Provisional Government. years old. His father was a prominent leader of Russia’s For a time, both the Provisional Government and the Soviets Constitutional Democratic Party, and when the Russian controlled Russia—the Provisional Government had control Revolution broke out in 1917, Nabokov and his family were over the country as a whole, and the Soviets had power over forced to leave Russia for Crimea. No one expected the the middle and lower classes—but this system of dual power revolution to last long, and the family assumed that they would did not last long. The Bolsheviks, a group of socialist Soviets led return to Russia; however, by 1919, the entire Nabokov family by Vladimir Lenin, formed the Red Army and gained control of was exiled in Europe. Nabokov went to England, where he Russia. Under the Bolsheviks, a new government was formed, enrolled at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study and Russia was reborn as a socialist state. Of course, civil war zoology and language. Nabokov was a gifted student, followed and pitted the Bolsheviks’ Red Army against the consistently testing at the top of his class, and he earned a BA White Army of counterrevolutionaries. The Russian Civil War in 1922. After college, he moved to Berlin, where the rest of his finally ended on October 25, 1922, in favor of the Red Army family was exiled. Nabokov stayed in Berlin for several years and the Soviets, which officially ended the Russian Revolution. and became a popular poet. In 1925, he married Véra The Soviets retained control of Russia and exerted power over Evseyevna Slonim and their only child, Dmitri, was born in the nearby countries of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, 1934. In 1937, Nabokov and his young family moved to France, and Azerbaijan, which effectively created the Union of Soviet but they then relocated to the United States in 1940 due to Socialist Republics (USSR). World War II. The Nabokovs initially arrived in New York City, but Nabokov accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College RELATED LITERARY WORKS in Massachusetts in 1941. Nabokov published his first English Postmodernism began in the second half of the 20th century, novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, that same year and later and it was generally a rejection of modernism and traditional became a United States citizen in 1945. As a lepidopterist (an notions of art. One of the ways postmodernists like Nabokov expert on moths and butterflies), Nabokov was the curator of reimagined literature was through metafiction, a type of writing lepidoptery at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative that draws attention to the construction and creation of a Zoology. He also taught Russian and European literature at literary work. Pale Fire—in which the narrator, Charles, Cornell University in New York from 1948 to 1959, where he constantly points out the creative process—is widely regarded had several prominent students, including future Supreme as a prominent piece of metafiction, along with Kurt onnegut’sV Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and writer Thomas Breakfast of Champions, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Salman Pynchon. The success and financial security that followed the Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Pale Fire is also known for its vivid 1955 publication of Lolita allowed Nabokov to step away from description of exile and the longing for one’s country that often teaching, and in 1961, he relocated to Montreux, Switzerland, accompanies it, a theme that is also explored in On Earth We’re and began writing full time. Nabokov wrote several novels, Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, nonfiction works, and books of poetry while in Switzerland, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. Lastly, including Pale Fire in 1962, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Pale Fire examines sexuality and bias against the gay Revisited in 1967, and Carrousel, which was published community, which can also be seen in Dashka Slater’s The 57 posthumously in 1987. He died in 1977 at the age of 78 after a Bus, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Tony lengthy and undiagnosed illness. Nabokov is widely accepted as Kushner’s Angels in America. one of the finest writers of English prose, and many critics and scholars count both Pale Fire and Lolita among the best novels ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 1 Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com KEY FACTS that Shade is working on will be all about Zembla, incorporating these stories about Charles the Beloved. As Kinbote reveals • Full Title: Pale Fire more about King Charles, it becomes clear that Kinbote • When Written: 1962 believes that he is King Charles—he is merely disguised as • Where Written: Montreux, Switzerland Charles Kinbote, a professor of Zemblan at Wordsmith • When Published: 1962 College, to avoid the extremist Zemblan assassin Gradus who is trying to hunt him down. • Literary Period: Postmodernism • Genre: Fiction On the day that Shade finishes his poem, Kinbote invites Shade to dinner. As Shade and Kinbote cross the street, Gradus • Setting: New Wye (a town in the United States) and Zembla appears on Kinbote’s doorstep, pulls out a gun, and accidentally (a fictional country near the Russian border) kills Shade while attempting to murder Kinbote (whom he • Climax: Jakob Gradus kills John Shade. knows to be King Charles). In her grief, Shade’s diabolical and • Antagonist: Jakob Gradus conniving widow, Sybil, grants Kinbote permission to edit • Point of View: First Person Shade’s final poem, but when Kinbote reads the poem, he’s devastated to find that it’s not about embla—it’sZ actually an EXTRA CREDIT autobiographical poem about Shade’s family, the natural world, and his obsession with the idea that human consciousness can Literary Irony. At a social event in 1916, Zinaida Gippius, a survive death. Nonetheless, as Kinbote re-reads the poem, he famous Russian writer and philosopher, reportedly said to realizes that Shade has subtly inserted many references to Nabokov’s father, “Please tell your son he will never be a writer.” Zembla and to Kinbote’s stories about King Charles, and Shade Gippius made her request after Nabokov published his first has even predicted the approach of his own assassin, book of poetry, and Nabokov went on to become a celebrated Gradus—this is miraculous, since Shade knew nothing of the writer of both poetry and prose. man until the moment he died. Kinbote blames Sybil’s nefarious influence for the fact that emblaZ isn’t more explicitly at the Accidental Death. In 1922, Nabokov’s father was shot and center of “Pale Fire,” and he devotes his Commentary on the killed in Berlin trying to shield Pavel Milyukov, a fellow exile and poem to explaining how the poem is actually about Zembla. leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democratic Party, from an Of course, this is not at all what has happened—Kinbote is a assassin’s bullet. A similar tragedy is seen in Pale Fire. delusional megalomaniac and his narration is completely unreliable. In fact, his name is not even Kinbote; the novel’s PLOT SUMMARY narrator is actually the professor V. Botkin who believes himself to be the exiled King of Zembla living in disguise as Pale Fire is a novel written in the form of a scholarly work: the Charles Kinbote. A careful reader can piece together annotated edition of the poet John Shade’s final poem, “Pale Nabokov’s clues and arrive at the novel’s true plot, which is as Fire.” As such, the novel consists of the text of the poem itself, follows. plus a Foreword, Commentary, and Index written by Shade’s V. Botkin is a Russian-born language professor at Wordsmith colleague and neighbor, Professor Charles Kinbote. As the College. He’s not well-liked by his colleagues because he’s poem’s editor, Kinbote’s job is to help readers understand unpleasant, eccentric, thin-skinned, self-centered, gay, and a Shade’s poem by providing analysis and context—a task at pedophile—not to mention clinically insane, suffering from which he comically fails, since he devotes most of his delusions and hallucinations that he cannot control. Botkin is Commentary to telling unrelated stories of King Charles the renting a house from Judge Goldsworth, a local judge with a Beloved, the deposed king of Kinbote’s native country of reputation for being excessively punitive, and the house Zembla. happens to be across the street from where John and Sybil Pale Fire has, in a sense, two plots: the apparent plot (which is Shade live.