a pleasure! like i said, my first reading echoes yours and most others. my second reading echoes Nabokov's derisive snort towards the first. all the same, both deal with the dual-ity of objective/subjective, both within the poem (real/reflection) and without (canonical/interpretation). here abridged, Nabokov reveals the temporal dysphoria embodied by King Kinbote and his wife Queen Disa, as well as the self-hatred of gender dysphoria culminating into self-realization and the most delicate expression of self-compassion:

There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes.

I am thinking of lines in which Shade describes his wife. Sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Disa at thirty bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

The heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends. Worries assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her.

The dream was a constant refutation of his not loving her.

this is the greatest verse in the history of literature. the greatest of sensibilities expressed in any form. it presents Kinbote as self-evident reality (simulacrum), not Professor V. Botkin's nor Nabokov's delusion, that allows Shade to paint Disa from Sybil. the same Kinbotes serenading Disas by a hospice bedside, by a photograph, by a mirror, by a grave. i switched the order for effect, as the last bit about self-compassion is a genius dual negative sleight of hand. the bit about writing poems echoes an interview with Robert Frost (whose symbolist poetry Shade reflects and Kinbote subverts): "If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything." here is some mad, hilarious nonsense from Kimbote lampooning Eystein's trompe l'oeil replacing a painting with what was painted:

Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.

the notes are far more beautiful than the poem for the fact that replacing Disa with Sybil is replacing a painting with what was painted, where Disa is the "plain unretouched likeness" of Shades' painting, and without Kinbote's mad, hilarious nonsense the poem is a mere "idealized and stylized picture." without Kinbote, Shade merely licks the symbols of Frost on the windowpane. because Kinbote is the Shadow of the symbol slain, uniting the viewer and the view.

imagine subverting the greatest symbolist poet with the invention of postmodern simulacrum before it was cool.

Bonus: The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)