I've always assumed the opposite, where Pale Fire was a sort of self-parodical novel, playing on Nabokov's realization of his own eccentricities.
Although Pale Fire came out in 1962 and Nabokov's Onegin in 1964, he had been working on Onegin translation since at least 1950, according to a piece he wrote in 1955, yclept 'Problems of Translation: "Onegin" in English'. A favorite quote of mine from that Partisan Review article:
"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity."[1]
I highly recommend giving the article a read if you haven't come upon it, and are interested in hearing his theory (and distaste for "substitut[ing] easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text") in his own words!
Performance art it may well still be! But, a performance involving writing precise treatises well before Pale Fire was released.
Yes, I should have been more clear in original post. I think Onegin, Pale Fire, and his other critical writings on translation are all part of the same artistic performance. We tend to look at writers/artist through this kind of atomizing lens, distinguishing one work from another in a kind of consumptive mode. Each book as a product to be evaluated in relation to others, it's techniques separate from the experience of the work. I think this says more about the circumstances of art under Capitalism than a writer's/artist's subjectivity, especially in the case of someone like Nabokov, who was so obviously fond of meta-narratives and intertexuality.
Although Pale Fire came out in 1962 and Nabokov's Onegin in 1964, he had been working on Onegin translation since at least 1950, according to a piece he wrote in 1955, yclept 'Problems of Translation: "Onegin" in English'. A favorite quote of mine from that Partisan Review article:
"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity."[1]
I highly recommend giving the article a read if you haven't come upon it, and are interested in hearing his theory (and distaste for "substitut[ing] easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text") in his own words!
Performance art it may well still be! But, a performance involving writing precise treatises well before Pale Fire was released.
[1]http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/d... , the article starts on page 496/148.