Life Writing: A Parodical Springboard in Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov is a parodist par excellence targeting numerous earlier literary texts as well as devices. Parodies manipulated in his 1962 novel, Pale Fire, are more intricate, mannered, and fabricated in terms of their dimension and depth than those in his previous novels. This essay intends to address one specific parodied artifice in the novel of interest, life writing (more often referred to as auto/biography), specifically from the perspective of the formal and textual construction in two major regards: first, the translation and annotation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin not only provides the source of inspiration but also serves as one parodied means of life writing to shape the structural framework of this uniquely personalized novel; and second, the novel draws heavily from the life writing in Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson by parodying the biographer/subject relationship. This essay contends that it is through the prism of parody that Nabokov revives and innovates in Pale Fire life writing both as a genre and literary approach by referring the readers back to the pre-texts. In this sense, parody functions as a springboard to a higher level of literary creation, as is typically exemplified in Pale Fire.