Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire,’ The Poem – Can It Stand on Its Own?

There’s a longstanding disagreement among Nabokov fans about the eponymous 999-line poem at the center of the novel Pale Fire: Can the poem be taken seriously as literature by itself or is it inseparable from the annotative footnotes (putatively by the madman who stole the manuscript of the verse) that form the rest of the novel? This fall, a publisher is releasing a freestanding version of the poem – as a book-cum-objet d’art – that’s certain to reignite the controversy.