"watch out for my cousin.."

Cooped--have you seen this article in The Guardian (UK)?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/17/inside-story-nabokov-last-work

This thread has inspired me to go back an reread Pale Fire, and listen to these prescient words, written in the early 60's:

The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards...the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans--who affirmed without having seen the manuscript of the poem that it "consists of disjointed drafts none of which yield a definite text"--is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet's work was interrupted by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator.

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe.

Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to come swirling around her husband's manuscript...Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his...with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide.  To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, is is the commentator who has the last word.

Great, eh?

From Pale Fire:  

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.