Pale Fire is Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, an astonishingly clever and formally intricate novel that crystallises his great themes into what Mary McCarthy called “one of the very great works of art of this century”. For all its complex elusiveness and allusiveness, its games of inversion and reflection, it remains a novel of thrilling dynamism, demanding that an energised reader take on the role of metafictional sleuth and solve this bizarre novel’s multitudinous mysteries. Pale Fire has been cited as playing a fundamental role in the development of literary postmodernism, has inspired a whole generation of experimental novelists, and remains the Nabokovian text that provokes the most incendiary of interpretative debates.
Pale Fire was published in 1962: it was Nabokov’s fourteenth novel and the fifth he had published in English. Despite the demands that came with...
2258 words
Citation: White, Duncan. "Pale Fire". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 January 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2978, accessed 09 June 2026.]
