Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov · 1962

A 999-line poem by the fictional poet John Shade is presented with an extensive commentary by his self-appointed editor Charles Kinbote, whose annotations spiral away from the poem into his own delusional secret history as the exiled king of Zembla.

Books mentioned in Pale Fire (21)

• Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare: “All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zembla! ... something I might use for a title. And the find is “pale fire.””
• Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: “his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer”
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare: “He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest.”
• A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: “anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick”
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: “anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet”
• My Last Duchess by Robert Browning: “Lines 671-672: The Untamed Seahorse. See Browning's My Last Duchess.”
• An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope: “This is, of course, from Pope's Essay on Man.”
• On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats: “Line 98: On Chapman's Homer. A reference to the title of Keats' famous sonnet”
• Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell: “JAMES BOSWELL, the Life of Samuel Johnson (epigraph)”
• La Cigale et la Fourmi by Jean de La Fontaine: “the same absurd mistake has been made by generations of translators of Lafontaine's La Cigale et la Fourmi”
• The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn by Andrew Marvell: “The other poem, Andrew Marvell's “The Nymph on the Death of her Fawn,” seems to be, technically, even tougher to stuff into French verse”
• The Forgotten Language by Erich Fromm: Quoted by Prof. C. from Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language, 1951, N.Y., p. 240
• The Psychoanalytic Method by Oskar Pfister: Quoted by Prof. C. from Dr. Oskar Pfister, The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, N.Y., p. 79
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: “present to rosy youths Finnigan's Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's “incoherent transactions””
• A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman: “Alfred Housman (1859-1936), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson”
• In Memoriam by Alfred Tennyson: “vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)”
• The King's Mirror: “discuss the Zemblan variants ... of the Kongsskuggsio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century”
• The Rhyme of the Three Sealers by Rudyard Kipling: “had just completed Kipling's “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers””
• Little Red Riding Hood by Brothers Grimm: “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation”
• The Poetic Edda: “a charming quatrain from our Zemblan counterpart of the Elder Edda, in an anonymous English translation (Kirby's?)”
• Der Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “allude to the wellknown poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood”

Books that mention Pale Fire (1)

• The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963)”