![]() This, of course, is exactly as Nabokov intended.īecause we know that Kinbote is delusional, paranoid, and possibly schizophrenic, we know that we are meant to consider his conferral of the "last word" on the commentator less as the reasoning of dubious scholarship than of the asylum. ![]() There may be something that readers find valid in the essential spirit of Kinbote's statement-that all art inevitably and necessarily relies on its context for its meaning-but when the idea is fed through the mechanism of Kinbote's madness, of all that absurdity and monstrous egoism, any validity it might have had is obliterated. We never get sincerity or didacticism in Nabokovs fiction the true thought or intention always has to be sifted out of the irony, and, in the case of Pale Fire, separated from the tangles of Charles Kinbote's insanity. He sees himself as an artist in a vacuum, or rather sees all art, when it’s good, as creating a vacuum around itself by transcending all contextual dependencies. We know that Nabokov despises all schools of thought that would suggest his art depends on anything other than his artistic genius for its value. ![]() More than that, it is a convoluted ironic construction through which Kinbote's creator, Vladimir Nabokov, asserts the aesthetic ideas which Kinbote's remarks contradict on every level. ![]() This is how Charles Kinbote concludes an insane preface to the poem he hijacked from a freshly murdered poet. ![]()
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