The Russian Box Trick

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 had untied the knots and the box was empty.

-- Vladimir Nabokov

No critic, Russian or not, has yet been able to lock Vladimir Nabokov in a box, except for the clumsily made critical box labeled "cleverness" -- a confinement not really confining, since cleverness implies an ability to get out of boxes. Still, by general acknowledgment, Nabokov is the cleverest author to write in Russian in the last few decades, and probably the cleverest in English since James Joyce, despite the fact that English is his third language.

But winning acknowledgment as the cleverest writer is a touchy business, a little like becoming Pope -- one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility -- or perhaps in bewilderment.

At the book's core is a long, sober meditation in rhymed couplets by the late and highly respected poet John Shade.

Surrounding it is a dense, many-layered rind of preface, commentary and index, compiled by a scholarly ass named Charles Kinbote. This obtuse fellow imagines himself to have been a great friend of Shade's. Actually, as is absurdly and delightfully evident after a few pages, Kinbote knew the old poet for only a few months, and their friendship consisted of bare toleration on Shade's side.

Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin the Vague, grandson of Thurgus the Turgid.

It begins to be clear that Kinbote hoped to get Shade to make an epic of Charles the Beloved's decline and fall.

Whenever he could get Shade's ear, he filled it with the romance of Zembla. But the poem, when it appears, is a sad, thoughtful intimation of mortality 999 lines long, focused loosely around the suicide of Shade's 23-year-old ugly-duckling daughter.

Here Nabokov becomes more poet than stuntman; the elegy Pale Fire has a lean grace and clarity of emotion worthy of a writer who is ranked, as Shade is supposed to be, only a step behind Robert Frost.

Its lyrical first stanza, in which Shade as a boy gazes at reflections in a window, is one of the best: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass . . .

There is nothing of the runaway king here. This does not deter Commentator Kinbote, who charges darkly that Shade's wife blocked every mention of Zembla out of personal pique, and sets out to fill in the story Shade left out. Leaping with no excuse at all from inoffensive phrases in the poem, Kinbote plunges into lengthy accounts of the Zemblan king's idyllic boyhood, his pederastic youth, his glorious escape during the revolution, and the academic education that allowed the incognito expatriate to land a lecturing job at Appalachia University in New Wye, U.S.A.

Shade himself cannot be asked about his intentions, because he is dead--shot by Gradus, a Zemblan assassin who was aiming at the exile king (the murderer claimed to be merely an escaped maniac named Jack Grey, and was believed by police).

Between Two Figments. Is Kinbote really an ex-king? Evidence points several ways, and the notes end, slyly, with Kinbote musing that he might write a play with three main characters: "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who perishes in the clash between two figments." Kinbote may, indeed, be hiding from his keepers.

A more troubling question is this: What did Nabokov have in mind when he wrote the book? Everything in it--and particularly the wiry elegance of the poem itself --denies the possibility that it is merely aimless entertainment. And although parts of the book are wickedly satirical of pompous emigres and academic wooden-heads, there seems to be no main target for the satire.

One explanation may lie in Nabokov's hypersensitivity to what is written about him. He does not at all enjoy the spectacle of clumsy minds trying to sniff out the "true" Nabokov. In Switzerland, where he now lives with his wife in a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, he is abnormally cautious in what he says to reporters. Lolita was praised or damned with energy and ignorance by almost everyone licensed to operate a typewriter.

It seems possible that Pale Fire is a wonderfully funny trap for symbol simons, sex searchers and Ph.D. postulants.

Supporting this theory are the wealth of allusions that lead nowhere and the names that become meaningless anagrams ("Onhava," the capital of Zembla, becomes Navaho; ex-Zemblan can lead to dis-Zemblan, dissembler, resembler). Nabokov himself insists that "no book should ever have a deliberate message. It should be a combination of harmony and pleasure." If it is a key to a door, "the most important thing is for the key to work; it is quite unimportant what lies behind the door." Whatever meaning or non-meaning lies behind the door, any reader can delight in watching the greatest verbal prestidigitator of his time at work, keeping seven ambiguities in the air, cutting cliches in half with a flick of his snickersnee, and as a finale, slipping out of the tightest of knots, the tidiest of pigeonholes. It may not be significant, but it is done with dazzling skill.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.