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About This Novel

"Dark Fire" is an extremely strange novel by Nabokov, subverting people's inherent definition of novels. The novel consists of a preface, a four-chapter poem, commentary and index. Nabokov fictionalized a professor and poet Shade, and his colleague and neighbor Kim Porter. The poet left a long autobiographical poem after his death, and the neighbor wrote the preface, commentary, and index for the poem. The long poem only accounts for one-tenth of the book, but the commentary is very lengthy and cumbersome. The main body of the long poem talks about the poet's life, his dead daughter, his understanding of life, love, death, reality and illusion, etc. Through long comments, the neighbor interpreted the meaning of the poem as the story of the last king from the fictional country of Zambala. As an avant-garde exploratory writer, Nabokov was always looking for original novel forms. This intertextual structure with commentary as the main body reflects Nabokov's point of view: "Human life is nothing more than a series of notes added to an obscure and unfinished masterpiece."

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