From B. Boyd's VNAY:
At the end of his 1962 diary, Nabokov drafted some phrases for possible interviews:
'I wonder if any reader will notice the following details: 
1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-King and not even Dr. Kinbote but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman …'"

From Mary McCarthy's review, A Bolt From The Blue, The New Republic, June 4, 1962

Kinbote is mad. He is a harmless refugee pedant named Botkin who teaches in the Russian department and who fancies himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. This delusion, which he supposes to be his secret, is known to the poet, who pities him, and to the campus at large, which does not - the insensate woman in the grocery store was expressing the general opinion.
...
The paranoid political structure called Zembla in Botkin's exiled fantasy- with its Extremist government and secret agents - is a transliteration of a pederast's persecution complex, complicated by the "normal" conspiracy- mania of a faculty common room.
...
But there is in fact a "Zembla," behind the Iron Curtain. The real, real story, the plane of ordinary sanity and common sense, the reader's presumed plane, cannot be accepted as final. The explanation that Botkin is mad will totally satisfy only Professors H. and C. and their consorts, who can put aside Pale Fire as a detective story, with the reader racing the author to the solution. Pale Fire is not a detective story, though it includes one. Each plane or level in its shadow box proves to be a false bottom; there is an infinite perspective regression, for the book is a book of mirrors.
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On the one hand, 
VN never published or spoke, at least to my knowledge, the explanation given in Boyd's biography, hence the reader is not really bound by them. Obviously the thought was given form, but never publicly expressed, by VN, for whatever reason. Perhaps he thought it needed some balance or greater context.

On the other hand,
McCarthy's review reads to me like an authorial plant, (I suspect these things were quite common, and maybe still are) especially the line I've underlined which seems to speculate, in an assured way, on aspects of Botkin(Kinbote)'s relationship with Shade which I find underivable from the book as I remember it. Moreover the last paragraph quoted supplies the context, somewhat undercutting the full validity of the Botkin/Kinbote equation, that I find lacking in VN's draft note for interviews. 

And so, I fear, there is good cause to respect this equation.

Yet picking up on McCarthy's point that the reader's presumed plane, cannot be accepted as final, the reader might well wonder if there are alternate narratives that may even logically conflict with the one that equates Kinbote and Botkin, and yet possess not just other insights but their own forms of validation; (this might be termed the Rashomon hypothesis or structure); and whether this isn't the case with Hodge.

Some time ago I offered an explanation for the epigram that opens Pale Fire:

On Jun 9, 2010, at 2:32 PM, G S Lipon wrote (edited slightly):

This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. "Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats." And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said "But Hodge shan't be shot: no no, Hodge shall not be shot."
JAMES BOSWELL, The Life of Samuel Johnson


The epigram, coming from another literary biography, might seem to have some significance to the relationship between Shade and Kinbote. Instead its relevance is to VN and Shade. The basis of the analogy is that of control of another creature's fate. The despicable young gentleman holds the fate of the city's cats under his finger, the way VN holds the fate of his characters, in this case Shade. Presumably VN was amused or bothered by criticism of how he treated his fictitious creatures. Johnson's reassurance of the fate of his own cat, Hodge, is then to be applied to Shade, i.e., Shade shall not be shot. This should be taken as a clue against a naive reading of the novel in which Shade is indeed shot. Instead Shade loses his daughter; and then his sense of self when he metamorphoses into Kinbote; and then as Kinbote, presumably, does indeed take his own life by gunshot; but after the novel is over.

Interpreting the epigram to mean, Shade shall not be shot, opens the door to viewing Shade's death metaphorically; and to seeing Kinbote as an altered ego of Shade; a so-called multiple-personality.

The epigram, the inscrutable Hodge, occupies a prominent position, front and center, in the novel. Can any exegesis of the novel be complete, I wonder, that fails to give some interpretation of its meaning?

In this season of challenges, not the least of which is the heat and humidity prickling the upper mid-west, I wonder if I might challenge the list members, in as respectful a manner as might be done with words without seeming overly coy or pandering, to adjudge my analysis, its conclusion and how it comports with the notion of Kinbote being a figment of Botkin; how to balance these views. Or are there other interpretations for Johnson's favorite cat?

Respectfully and placidly yours,
–GSL.

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