Abstract

Structurally, the novel is composed of a large-scale poem, nearly a thousand lines long, 'Pale Fire,' written in heroic stanza by the renowned American poet John Francis Shade, and an extensive commentary on this poem, which takes up most of the novel, compiled by Dr. Charles Kinbote. Naturally, both Shade and Kinbote are fictional characters, and the commentary itself, although formally constructed according to the laws of commentary on a literary work, is more like a literary game, containing a huge number of cultural references and freely operating in a variety of genres: from a play to a scientific article and memoir prose.