The monograph by Wellesley University (USA) professor Priscilla Meyer is dedicated to one of the best novels of the American period by Vladimir Nabokov, “Pale Fire” (1962). The author explores the literary, folklore, mythological, historical and scientific-philosophical origins of the novel, identifying heterogeneous intertextual layers and describing the mechanisms of intercultural exchange and translation functioning in Nabokov’s text. The consideration of the literary genealogy of “Pale Fire” involves a vast amount of artistic material - Icelandic sagas, Eddic poetry, skaldic poetry, Old English literature, the works of Shakespeare, Macpherson, Burger, Goethe, etc. At the same time, in the author’s field of view there are invariably other works of the writer that form significant context of the analyzed novel. First published in 1988, the monograph is among the most striking, heuristically fascinating and authoritative works on Nabokov's prose; numerous finds and discoveries of the author were taken into account in the commentary to “Pale Fire” in a five-volume collection of the writer’s English-language works (1997). For publication in Russian, a number of changes and clarifications were made to the text of the study.