Carolyn Kunin writes: "No one responded to my Pnin query - so I googled up the answer -- it's my own, but I had forgotten it:[  ]Admittedly, this requires some filling in on the part of the reader and I can't prove that this is what Nabokov intended, but it did give me pleasure to discover it and I have to suppose that this was intended by the author. A similar way of linking and filling in seems to work in Pale Fire, and I hope some one besides me is willing to try this way of reading the novel."

 

Jansy Mello: Dear Carolyn, I didn't respond to your query because I'm totally incompetent in these (and many other) matters, but I loved your query and the reply..It reminded me of Nabokov'a pusauit of a lost lorgnon. 

There must be many avenues to inquire into Pale Fire. I was struck by a term employed in relation to Bely and "The Gift," because it reappears in Kinbote's appraisal of John Shade's poem.*  "The Gift" was translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell and Dmitri Nabokov, in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov - so, who chose "gappy"? Besides, Kinbote's use of "gappy" may be unrelated to Fyodor's appraisal of his own verses. Anyway, coincidence or not, "gappy" led me to reconsider Bely's "rectangles and trapeziums" in connection to PF's rhyme scheme and its "crystal growth" (unfortunately I'm equally incompetent to pursue this thread). Gappy is a fairly common word and I don't know why it stayed in my mind.... 

 

Pale Fire: "This is extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions, and does not follow the lines of the card as rigidly as the Fair Copy does. Actually, it turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface. It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading. This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans — who affirmed without having seen the manuscript of the poem that it "consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a definite text" — is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet’s work was interrupted by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator."

 

 

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* - My sincerest thanks to the extremely useful reply by Joseph Schlegel:: "I did a fair amount of research on the topic of Bely and Nabokov for a paper I presented on Fyodor's poetry in The Gift - feel free to contact me for more information/Some of the more essential resources from the bibliography include:

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