The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold, or Nabokov's Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold War

In his revised autobiography, Speak, Memory (1966), Vladimir Nabokov recounts two chance events that had come to haunt his later life and fiction: the moment when his father was murdered by an assassin's bullet meant for another and the moment when as a boy Nabokov happened upon his brother Sergey's diary. That the accidental death of Nabokov's father (born 20 July) was personally significant—and a plausible germ for the accidental shooting of John Shade in Pale Fire (1962) on 21 July 1959—seems obvious; what is less clear is why his youthful snooping should be so poignant to him as a man in his sixties. Part of the answer comes toward the end of Speak, Memory, when the usually-eloquent Nabokov admits that for "various reasons I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother [Sergey]."¹ What he does remember with characteristic vividness, however, is the moment he transgressed his brother's personal privacy: "[A] page from his diary that I found on his desk and read, and in stupid wonder showed to my tutor, who promptly showed it to my father, abruptly provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part."² These "oddities" pertained, no doubt, to Sergey's homosexuality, about which the grown Nabokov had long felt uncomfortable, and which is referred to so obliquely in the autobiography that it remains—like Sergey himself—virtually absent. By couching his brother's homosexuality as an unspoken secret that would have been better left undiscovered, Nabokov in Speak, Memory confines the treatment of homosexuality to elliptical code words: Sergey is accorded a scant few sentences and thus barely exists for the reader. In the novel Pale Fire, on the other hand, the voluble Charles Kinbote gives over hundreds of pages of his "Commentary" to the tale of mythical Zembla, a narrative that functions, in part, to manage the open secret of Kinbote's own homosexuality. This secret makes him the object of persecution by a Cold War community that displaces a patriotism based on anti-Communism with a patriotism based on something equally pernicious—homophobia. Taking a cue from the chance events Nabokov insists were significant to his own life, I want to read the numerous and varied chance moments in Pale Fire as central to the design of the novel to see how the work intervenes in mid-century controversies about Communism and sexuality.

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Although Pale Fire may seem to be only an old-world aesthete's novel of wordplay and allusion that is blissfully disengaged from real-world Cold War politics, it is in fact this very wordplay that allows Nabokov to engage cultural narratives that prescribed the limits of mid-century reality—a word that Nabokov tended to use gingerly, with quotation marks.³ In Pale Fire, the politics of late 1950s America look enough like the "containment narrative" familiar to Cold War scholars (and Kinbote's invented Zembla looks enough like a Soviet satellite state) that we ought to ask to what end Nabokov is refracting real-world politics through the prism of his aesthetics.⁴ The aspect of Cold War political culture of particular importance to Pale Fire is the pervasive practice of eliding differences among the so-called enemies of democratic freedom to read homosexuals as political threats on par with Communists. For Nabokov, the logic of what I will refer to as the homophobic narrative was as tragically absurd as the logic of Kinbote's tale of Zembla, a parallel made visible by noticing how both phenomena attempt to control or manage chance.⁵ Nabokov challenges the cultural logic of the homophobic narrative by allowing chance to infiltrate his novel on the local linguistic level, as well as on the broader level of plot. The novel's form frustrates linear reading not only because...