Kinbote's suggestion that we buy two copies and shuffle the cut pages is another indication of his shameless self-promotion, but it aptly raises the question of how readers should proceed with their imaginative cutting and pasting. Perhaps the game has no objective or even any rules of play. Readers of the novel should use Pale Fire to achieve epiphanies like those Nabokov describes in Speak, Memory . If we don the mask, put on the Nabokovian ethos, it becomes more difficult to denounce Kinbote for the capriciousness of his glosses on Shade's poem. We must remember, however, that the virtues of Nabokov are not identical with the virtues of Kinbote.
Precision is as important as creativity.
Indeed, just as he equates artifice and nature, Nabokov would see precision and creativity not as different virtues but as alternative manifestations of the same virtue. For Nabokov, reading is fraught with care. Access to Nabokov's potustoronnost , the otherworld, the underlying desire of Kinbote as well as Shade, demands artful precision as well as resplendent creativity. Since no certainties are possible regarding this other realm, Nabokov would say that simple correspondences, autobiographical explanations, and materialistic formulas are all reductive and misleading. Hence for Nabokov the construction and reconstruction of aesthetic performances takes on the utmost ethical importance.