Mullins, Dyche R. Conjuring in Two Tongues: The Russian and English Prosodies of Nabokov’s "Pale Fire", Appendices and Maps. 2017

Dyche Mullins studies the prosody of Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry in “Conjuring in Two Tongues: The Russian and English Prosodies of Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’,” employing analytical tools described by Nabokov himself in Notes on Prosody to demonstrate how the poet wove cryptic Russian rhythms into his English verse. These ‘foreign’ rhythms mark themes of exile and dislocation, and help create the unsettling sense that another, unseen world lies close at hand (потусторонность). For example, the émigré professor of “An Evening of Russian Poetry” lectures to his audience in Russian rhythms, at first to illustrate his didactic points and then later when confronted by a spectral, “Russian something” that follows him everywhere. Similarly, the most concentrated Russian rhythm in “Pale Fire” is bracketed by a dying man who “conjures in two tongues” and a spirit who raps out messages from the afterlife. Finally, we discover that Charles Kinbote was right: we can actually see Jakob Gradus woven into the prosody of Pale Fire, riding up “…on the escalator of the pentameter."