NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

I leave my poet's reader to decide whether it is likely he would have written this only a
few days before he repeated its miniature themes in this part of the poem. I suspect it
to be a much earlier effort (it has no year subscript but should be dated soon after his
daughter's death) which Shade dug out from among his old papers to see what he
could use for Pale Fire (the poem our necrologist does not know).
Line 62: often
Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude
is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress.
There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in
a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home long after midnight). Yet I
wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul.
Everybody knows how given to regicide Zemblans are: two Queens, three Kings, and
fourteen pretenders died violent deaths, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, and drowned, in
the course of only one century (1700-1800). The Goldsworth castle became
particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the
nightfall of the mind. Stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear leaves, an idle
breeze, a dog touring the garbage cans - everything sounded to me like a bloodthirsty
prowler. I kept moving from window to window, my silk nightcap drenched with
sweat, my bared breast a thawing pond, and sometimes, armed with the judge's
shotgun, I dared beard the terrors of the terrace. I suppose it was then, on those
masquerading spring nights with the sounds of new life in the trees cruelly mimicking
the cracklings of old death in my brain, I suppose it was then, on those dreadful nights,
that I got used to consulting the windows of my neighbor's house in the hope for a
gleam of comfort (see notes to lines 47-48). What would I not have given for the
poet's suffering another heart attack (see line 691 and note) leading to my being called
over to their house, all windows ablaze, in the middle of the night, in a great warm
burst of sympathy, coffee, telephone calls, Zemblan herbal receipts (they work
wonders!), and a resurrected Shade weeping in my arms ("There, there, John"). But
on those March nights their house was as black as a coffin. And when physical
exhaustion and the sepulchral cold drove me at last upstairs to my solitary double bed,
I would lie awake and breathless - as if only now living consciously through those
perilous nights in my country, where at any moment, a company of jittery
revolutionists might enter and hustle me off to a moonlit wall. The sound of a rapid
car or a groaning truck would come as a strange mixture of friendly life's relief and
death's fearful shadow: would that shadow pull up at my door? Were those phantom
thugs coming for me? Would they shoot me at once - or would they smuggle the
chloroformed scholar back to Zembla, Rodnaya Zembla, to face there a dazzling
decanter and a row of judges exulting in their inquisitorial chairs?
At times I thought that only by self-destruction could I hope to cheat the relentlessly
advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, rather
than on that constant highway looping up over me and around my heart as I dozed off
only to have my sleep shattered by that drunken, impossible, unforgettable Bob's
return to Candida's or Dee's former bed. As briefly mentioned in the foreword, I
finally threw him out; after which for several nights neither wine, nor music, nor
prayer could allay my fears. On the other hand, those mellowing spring days were
quite sufferable, my lectures pleased everybody, and I made a point of attending all
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