Sputniks, Ice-Picks, G.P.U.: Nabokov's Pale Fire

The article will be looking at Nabokov’s Pale Fire as a novel about transatlantic invasion and infiltration fears in Cold War America, specifically post-Sputnik assassination fantasies sparked by the visit of Khrushchev to the United States in 1959 in the light of ICBM anxieties. The essay outlines the contexts of the Sputnik scare and relates it to details in the novel that relate to the GPU (or KGB) assassin, Gradus. It then moves on to develop an intricate series of parallels between the novel’s representation of the shooting of the poet John Shade and the assassination of Trosky by Mercader in 1940, using the 1959 The Mind of an Assassin by Cold Warrior and Soviet watcher Isaac Don Levine. This text includes startling detailed information based on Mexican psychological profiling of Mercader based on Cold War Freudian premises, as well as clear and irrefutable evidence of Nabokov’s secret coding of this text into his novel. The article then concludes with speculation as to the thrust of Nabokov’s reasons for setting this parallel up: firstly, because of the imminent release of Mercader; secondly, due to the prominence amongst Cold War ideologues of ex-Trotskyite non-communist intellectuals such as the writers of Partisan Review; and finally, because of Nabokov’s own sense of himself as split between his ‘American’ Robert Frost-like personality, and his suspicious Russian identity (turning on the ways his own family history – namely the death of his father thwarting an assassination of the liberal Russian ‘Whites’ in Berlin ¬– is inverted and twisted in the novel). The article finishes with a definition of non-communist left and liberal America’s imaginary notion of transatlantic relations as inflected by Cold War-hysterical fears and anxieties about invasive and lethal invasion of the body politics from deviant Russian-American fifth columnists.