Word: shaded
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Here Nabokov becomes more poet than stuntman; the elegy Pale Fire has a lean grace and clarity of emotion worthy of a writer who is ranked, as Shade is supposed to be, only a step behind Robert Frost...
Whenever he could get Shade's ear, he filled it with the romance of Zembla. But the poem, when it appears, is a sad, thoughtful intimation of mortality 999 lines long, focused loosely around the suicide of Shade's 23-year-old ugly-duckling daughter...
...lyrical first stanza, in which Shade as a boy gazes at reflections in a window, is one of the best: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff-and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected...
There is nothing of the runaway king here. This does not deter Commentator Kinbote, who charges darkly that Shade's wife blocked every mention of Zembla out of personal pique, and sets out to fill in the story Shade left out. Leaping with no excuse at all from inoffensive phrases in the poem, Kinbote plunges into lengthy accounts of the Zemblan king's idyllic boyhood, his pederastic youth, his glorious escape during the revolution, and the academic education that allowed the incognito expatriate to land a lecturing job at Appalachia University in New Wye, U.S.A...
...Shade himself cannot be asked about his intentions, because he is dead-shot by Gradus, a Zemblan assassin who was aiming at the exile king (the murderer claimed to be merely an escaped maniac named Jack Grey, and was believed by police...