Let us, that is, approach Pale Fire through the Looking Glass. I was the shadow of the waxwing, slain By the false azure of the windowpane. So begins John Shade’s poem.

3. Besides, when it’s not making you cry, Pale Fire will make you laugh—another emblem of what is, under all the po-mo scaffolding, an open and inviting door.

Here then is a work of Nabokov’s youth, and the early Nabokov is no mean author; we are indeed in the presence of the same man who wrote Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire. We find the same magic language ...

“Pale Fire” (1962). An avalanche of superlatives applies: It is his most inexhaustible work, most tragic, most gleeful, most inventive, most tender, most dissected by scholars.

Séances play a role in Nabokov’s 1962 novel, “Pale Fire”—which, like “Speak, Memory,” is an artistic effort to undo the losses incurred by time, to find the “correlated pattern in ...

PALE FIRE (315 pp.)—Vladimir Nabokov—Putnam ($5).Desperate Russian critics, trying hard to pigeonhole my own novels, have once or twice linked me up with Gogol, but when they looked again I ...

His other works (The Eye, Pale Fire, Pnin, etc.) have been more complex fantasies. One of them is this prophetic, satirical play, written in 1938 and now gracefully translated from the Russian by ...

John J. Miller is joined by Andrea Pitzer to discuss Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. John J. Miller brings The Great Books podcast to a close. John J. Miller is joined by Peter Meilaender of ...