Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

Thus, there is only one allusion to my friend’s masterpiece (the neatly stacked batches of which, as I write this, lie in the sun on my table as so many ingots of fabulous metal) and this I transcribe with morbid delight: “Just before our poet’s untimely death he seems to have been working on an autobiographical poem.” The circumstances of this death are completely distorted by the professor, a faithful follower of the gentlemen of the daily press who—perhaps for political reasons—had falsified the culprit’s motives and intentions without awaiting his trial—which unfortunately was not to take place in this world (see eventually my ultimate note). But, of course, the most striking characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John’s life.