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

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Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London, 1962).
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago,
81968),
p. 127.
Vladimir Nabokov in an Interview with Robert
Hughes for the Television 13 Educational Program,
New York, (September 1965), reprinted in Vladimir
Nabokov, Strong Opinions, (London, 1974), p. 55.
Gilbert Highet, "To the Sound of Hollow Laughter",
Horizon, IV (July 1962), p. 90.
Dwight Macdonald, "Virtuosity Rewarded, or Dr Kinbote's
Revenge", Partisan Review, 29 (1962),
pp. 437,439: "Unreadable"; "too clever by half";
"high class doodling. "
Alfred Chester, "Nabokov's Anti-Novel", Commentary,
34 (November 1962), p. 451: "a total wreck. "
Laurence Lerner, "Nabokov's Cryptogram", The
Listener, LXVIII (November 29,1962), p. 931:
"Mr Nabokov is a comic writer of high talent,
perhaps of genius; but he can go and play his
cryptographic games on someone else, not on me. "
K. Allsop, "After Lolita is this Nabokov just pulling
our legs? ", Daily Mail, 8 Nov., 1962, p. 12:
"It is a mirage made to measure for Sir Winston
Churchill's Chinese phrase: 'A riddle wrapped in
a mystery inside an enigma'. " - "In the plodding
mule-train of conventional writing this is a
unicorn of a novel. "
Mary McCarthy "Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire",
,
Encounter XIX (October 1962), pp. 71,84).
Shade's poem has been said to be "about nothing
in particular": Richard Kostelanetz, "Nabokov's
Obtuse Fool", On Contemporary Literature, ed.
Richard Kostelanetz, (New York, 1964), p. 481,
whereas another critic has regarded it as "a serious
meditation on death. " Page Stegner, Escape
into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov,
New York, 1966), p. 117.
Kinbote's commentary has been condemned as
111 rubbish' which has nothing to do with the matter
and style of the poem" by one critic: Gilbert
Highet, "To the Sound of Hollow Laughter", p. 89,
and has been called "a great scholarly commentary"
by another: Julian Moynahan, Vladimir Nabokov,
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American
Writers, 96, (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 43.