Few contemporary novels have continued to baffle readers for so long as Nabokov's Pale Fire, an authentic tour de force. Joyce's Ulysses has, from the start, teased the annotators to elucidate the many linguistic and intertextual enigmas it teems with, and challenged critics from all walks of academia to provide inspired interpretations, but it remains largely open structurally and encourages the reader to appropriate it creatively and to apply to it the methodological grids at his disposal. One might say that Ulysses, which has proven to be an inexhaustible source of high-flown gnoses, is reader-friendly, whereas Pale Fire, more than a generation after its first publication, remains durably reader-resistant. The latest row in 1997–98 on the electronic Nabokov Forum (NABOKV-L) over the question of who invented whom in the novel bears evidence that, no matter how many of its so-called secrets have been cracked, it remains as disturbing as it was when it first came out, as if its author, before departing upon his aeonian crusade on Anti-Terra, had safely locked it in a poetic belt and catapulted the key into inter-galactic space on his way.

Since Mary McCarthy's celebrated “Bolt from the Blue,” each new exegete who has tried to tackle this difficult novel, the present one included, has paused more or less as a lucky space-traveler who would have stumbled upon the magic key, until someone came around and told him or her that he or she had obviously brought back the wrong key, since the belt – the text – remained hermetically locked.