Vladimir Nabokov

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.Part of a major new beautiful hardback series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

Pale Fire

sariya

"He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory."

"Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world, I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one manner; I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web."

"Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor."

"Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, / My dark vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest / My admirable butterfly!"

savannah eden

                                I can't tell you how

I knew - but I did know that I had crossed

And blood-black nothingness began to spin

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

it's like this ache beyond reason, beyond sense. we yearn chase cling to any fragment left for us or we so imagined

weli 

i think she always nursed a small mad hope

"One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure."

Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret.

Conor Murphy

I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel.

One might bear—a strong merciless dreamer might bear—the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her.

Pale Fire quotes

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