''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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Americans of today. "24 He comments with his usual
irreverence on works that belong to world literature25,
and deals uncharitably with earlier and faulty
commentaries.
26
His personal comments, however, never crowd into
the foreground. The main concern, namely to serve
the masterpiece and its author, is faithfully followed
throughout, so that, as Field says, the attentive
reader should be "ready for" Eugene Onegin after
reading the introductory essays27, and that, as another
critic has put it, "the non-Russian reader has
a fairly good chance of coming to know the Russian
Onegin. " 28
It soon becomes clear that, except for the outward
form, no similarity exists between Nabokov's edition
of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Kinbote's edition of
Shade's Pale Fire, as has sometimes been suggested,
for Kinbote is guilty of the most unconventional and
incompetent use of all the stock devices of scholarly
editorial work and of continually committing all the
slips and blunders an editor can possibly commit.
"Pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance" appear as his
main characteristics and it is clear that he is meant
to be a parody of what he says he is.
Some of the editorial peculiarities are betrayed
in the very foreword and then sprout fantastic growths
in the commentary (in Kinbote's words "an unambiguous
apparatus criticus" [86] where "placid scholarship
should
reign"
[100]), in which even more of his short-
comings become apparent. The beginning of the foreword