Pale Fire

A 999-line poem by a New England poet comes wrapped in the mad commentary of his neighbour, who reads into it the story of a deposed king from an imaginary northern land; the real ground beneath it is Nabokov's Cornell and the town of Ithaca.

John Shade

Wordsmith College

The commentary

John Shade is the resident poet at Wordsmith College, and it is here that the deranged Kinbote attaches himself to him as colleague and neighbour. The genteel campus is the stage for a one-sided friendship that Kinbote will later mistake for a shared secret about kings and assassins.

Foreword; note to lines 47-48

inspired by New Wye and its Wordsmith College are fictional and set in an invented Appalachia. Nabokov taught at Cornell in Ithaca while writing the book, and the campus is the accepted real-world model; anchored here to central Cornell, not presented as a named location.

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