Forget Lolita: Vladimir Nabokov’s real masterpiece has been overlooked

Most people who know Vladimir Nabokov’s name only know it because he wrote Lolita. And most people who’ve heard of Lolita have only heard of it because it’s about paedophilia. Even in his own day, Nabokov had to fight the misapprehension that he was a pornographer. Everyone knew what Lolita was about. Fewer people appreciated the artistic tightrope act Nabokov had pulled off in it. He’d written a funny, moving and beautiful book about a diabolically ugly theme.

Nabokov wrote another masterpiece, too – the perennially underrated Pale Fire. There’s no darkness to worry about in Pale Fire. It’s pure fun, a glorious showcase for Nabokov’s comic exuberance and verbal largesse. To read it is to watch a great literary mind at play, having as much fun with words as it’s possible to have.

A scene from the movie adaptation of Lolita starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.Credit:

Pale Fire appeared in 1962. The inspiration for it grew out of another project Nabokov was busy with at the time. In his capacity as a professional scholar he was working on a huge annotated translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the national poem of Nabokov’s long-lost Russian homeland.

As Nabokov laboured on his version of Pushkin, Pale Fire incubated in his imagination as a kind of literary “what if?” What if he were to write a novel that echoed and parodied the form of a scholarly edition? At the centre of the novel would be a long narrative poem, written by a fictional American poet – a genial Robert Frost type named John Shade. Surrounding this poem would be an introduction, index and set of notes, all composed by a fictional editor – an eccentric friend and neighbour of Shade’s named Charles Kinbote.

Via the character of Kinbote, Nabokov could explore another delicious “what if?” What if the annotator of Shade’s poem were not just eccentric but a total nutcase? What if he were to believe, erroneously, that Shade’s poem was all about him? What if he hijacked the poem’s notes and turned them into a kind of manic and deeply deluded autobiography?

Even before Nabokov wrote a word of it Pale Fire was already an audacious postmodern invention. Executing the concept, though, was going to take an incredible amount of writerly skill. Just for starters, Nabokov would have to compose a thousand-line poem that would sound like the work of a celebrated and homegrown American poet – a guy whose way with words was as American as apple pie.

And Nabokov was as Russian as blini. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he fled his homeland during the Bolshevik revolution. Settling in Berlin, he wrote his earliest novels in Russian. After Hitler came to power, Nabokov and his Jewish wife relocated to Paris. When the Nazis closed in on Paris the Nabokovs moved to America.

In one sense Nabokov then became an American novelist, writing novels in English about American life. But his talent was too large and individual to be contained by any one place or language. Although English wasn’t his mother tongue, he became one of the most freakishly inventive stylists in all of English literature.

In Pale Fire Nabokov’s impersonation of the all-American John Shade was uncanny enough. But it’s in the Kinbote sections that the book’s language really blasts off. Like the narrators of all Nabokov’s best novels, Kinbote is a madman. By inhabiting the skin of deranged narrators Nabokov was able to give full vent to his extravagant love of language. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” writes Humbert Humbert, the depraved narrator of Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a vastly underrated novel. Credit: Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The word “fancy” doesn’t begin to cover it. Nabokov was a verbal magician. He could reach into the middle of the most ordinary sentence and pull out an astonishing rabbit or bunch of flowers. Kinbote, talking about the rarity of his own character, says that examples of his type “can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand”. Who else but Nabokov would have thought of refurbishing that old phrase by inserting the word “maimed” in it?

Nabokov had a special knack for writing about animals. A black cat slips past Kinbote’s shins and goes “rippling down into the basement”. Outside on a hot day Kinbote suns himself “amid an ovation of crickets”. When a dull-witted enemy of Kinbote’s reads a newspaper his lips don’t just move; they move “like wrestling worms”.

Out on a ramble, Kinbote sees a butterfly “sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banisters on his birthday”.

I suppose we all have different ideas about what novels should do. Personally, I love literary fireworks. I love writers with lashings of intelligence, humour and verbal brio. Nabokov is my kind of novelist. And Pale Fire is my pick for the best novel he ever wrote.

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