Nabokov left an Easter Egg for re-readers. Did you find it?
Or “Plums” (preferably)
Pale Fire and the Cold War: Redefining Vladimir Nabokov’s Masterpiece
Michael Weiss. 10.13.13
“As Edward Snowden sat weighing his fortunes in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport last July, a man called Anton Bakov created a minor news item in Russia for offering to bestow a singular form of asylum on the fugitive NSA contractor. As URA.ru, a Russian news agency, put it, Bakov is a “Urals genius of political creativity... who has proclaimed himself prime minister of the Russian Empire of the North Pole and Antarctica,” a country that “does not have diplomatic relations with any state or, according to Bakov, need them.” It is “open to Russians but for various reasons not included within contemporary Russia.” One reason might be that the country does not actually exist on any map. It’s the product of the prime minister’s own mind and only represented on an intriguing website where the curious will discover that the Russian Empire, geographically situated in the noncontiguous regions of the north and south poles, is a constitutional monarchy meant to be the “successor” to the great dominion once ruled by Peter the Great. There’s even a Star Wars-themed promotional video.
Sadly, the one Russian who would have delighted most in this fantasy, particularly the way in which manic invention bleeds into international politics, is a St. Petersburg genius of literary creativity who’s been dead for 36 years.
In Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov invited his reader to question the reliability and sanity of his narrator, Charles Kinbote, the self-described exiled king of a land called Zembla who has claimed the role of annotator of a dead poet’s final masterpiece, which Kinbote has stolen.
All of Nabokov’s novels feature what he called “plums” but might also be thought of as Easter eggs: hidden allusions or jokes or legends for working out what it was that the great Russian had in mind with the use of a date, a name, or a metaphor. Nothing in Nabokov is ever wasted, yet much can be missed, especially upon the first reading, which is why he thought that books could only be “re-read.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/13/pale-fire-cold-war.html
and
Nabokov's Plums BOOKS AND AUTHORS by Maurice Dolbier *
The New York Herald Tribune Books section, page two, 17 June 1962
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" (Putnam's) consists of a 999-line poem by a man named John Shade and a commentary on the poem by a man who calls himself Dr. Charles Kinbote. Some of its reviewers have expressed doubts as to whether the book could properly be called a novel at all, but, in an interview the other day, Mr. Nabokov said: /"I think it is a perfectly straightforward novel. The clearest revelation of personality is to be found in the creative work in which a given individual indulges. Here the poet is revealed by his poetry; the commentator by his commentary." /It is the book that he most enjoyed writing./ "It is jollier than the others," he said, "and it is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find
http://innerlea.com/aulit/paleFire/notes/VNsPlums.html
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*- Also found in full at the VN-L Archives: As promised, here is the full text of the uncollected interview printed in the New York Herald Tribune Books section, page two, 17 June 1962. All ellipses are in the original. - BOOKS AND AUTHORS By Maurice Dolbier Matt Roth
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0803&L=nabokv-l&P=868784&E=0&B=--%3D__Part7157D2A4.0__%3D&T=text%2Fhtml
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