Gerald Emerald, who obligingly gives him a lift to Professor Kinbote's house. Gradus' slow descent on Wordsmith synchronizes, move by move, with Shade's composition of Pale Fire the thug, wearing a brown suit, a trilby, and carrying a Browning, alights on the campus the day the poem is finished. Meanwhile the Shadows, the Secret Police of Zembla, have hired a gunman, Jakob Gradus, alias Jacques d'Argus, alias Jacques Degre, alias Jack Grey, to do away with the royal exile. Gerald Emerald, a young man in a bow tie and green velvet jacket. His colleagues (read 'mortal enemies') include-besides burly Professor Hurley, head of the department and an adherent of ' engazhay' literature-Professor C, a literary Freudian and owner of an ultra-modern villa, a certain Professor Pnin, and an instructor, Mr.

Sylvia O'Donnell, has found him a post on the language faculty. What at once irresistibly peeps out from Kinbote's notes is that he himself is none other than Charles the Beloved, disguised in a beaver as an academic he escaped from Zembla in a motor boat and flew to America after a short stay on the Cote d'Azur an American sympathizer, a trustee of Wordsmith, Mrs. Kinbote believes that he has inspired his friend with his tales of his native Zembla, of its exiled king, Charles the Beloved, and the Revolution that started in the Glass Works indeed, he has convinced himself that the poem is his poem - the occupational mania of commentators-and cannot be properly understood without his gloss, which narrates Zemblan events paralleling the poet's composition.

Mary by vladimir nabokov