According to Norman Page, Pale Fire excited as diverse criticism as any of Nabokov's novels.[17] Mary McCarthy's review[18] was extremely laudatory; the Vintage edition excerpts it on the front cover.[19] She tried to explicate hidden references and connections. Dwight Macdonald responded by saying the book was "unreadable" and both it and McCarthy's review were as pedantic as Kinbote.[20] Anthony Burgess, like McCarthy, extolled the book,[21] while Alfred Chester condemned it as "a total wreck".[22]
Some other early reviews were less decided,[23] praising the book's satire and comedy but noting its difficulty and finding its subject slight[24][25] or saying that its artistry offers "only a kibitzer's pleasure".[26] Macdonald called the reviews he had seen, other than McCarthy's, "cautiously unfavorable".[20] Time's 1962 review stated that "Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility – or perhaps in bewilderment",[27] though this did not prevent the publication from including the book in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.[28]
The connection between Pale Fire and hypertext was stated soon after its publication; in 1969, the information-technology researcher Ted Nelson obtained permission from the novel's publishers to use it for a hypertext demonstration at Brown University.[29] A 2009 paper by Annalisa Volpone also compares Pale Fire to hypertext.[30]
The first Russian translation of the novel, one created by Véra Nabokov, its dedicatee, was published in 1983 by Ardis in Ann Arbor, Michigan[31] (Alexei Tsvetkov initially played an important role in this translation). [32]
After Nabokov's reputation was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union[33] (his novels started being published there in 1986[34] and the first book composed entirely of Nabokov's works was printed in 1988[35]), Pale Fire was published in 1991 in Sverdlovsk (in Sergei Ilyin's Russian translation).[36]
It was ranked 53rd on the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and 1st on the American literary critic Larry McCaffery's 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.
