Some books, like “The Institutionalist Approach to Public Utility Regulation,” defeat commentary; others, like “Ulysses,” invite it. “Pale Fire,” Vladimir Nabokov’s resplendent rare bird of a novel, comes with its own commentary built in. The novel has four distinct sections: 1) a short foreword by one Charles Kinbote, who has come into possession of a manuscript of the final work by his neighbor and academic colleague, the celebrated poet John Shade; 2) the text of Shade’s opus, “Pale Fire”—“a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos”; 3) a long commentary on “Pale Fire” by Kinbote (of which more shortly); and 4) a thorough, over-thorough index.

The foreword tells us that Shade has recently died and that Kinbote, ignoring the pleas of Shade’s widow and numerous academic Shadeans, has absconded with the manuscript of “Pale Fire” to the Northwest, where, in a rented “tumble-down ranch,” he sets about annotating the poem. As everyone who has read or even heard about “Pale Fire” knows, Kinbote’s commentary gets everything wrong: it is an anthology of delusion. Intrusive, lonely, desperate, and deranged, Kinbote tips his psychological hand early on when he begins to talk, in suspiciously intimate detail, about a certain king, Charles the Beloved, who is supposed to have ruled over the “distant northern land” of Zembla from 1936 until 1958, when a leftish insurrection toppled his reign and forced him into exile.

It doesn’t take us long to realize that Kinbote is, or believes himself to be, this king, and that he has spent the previous six months regaling Shade with stories of Charles the Beloved in the hope that he would transform them into art. “Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme!” writes Kinbote, trying to choke back his anguish on realizing that Shade’s poem, an essentially autobiographical meditation on time, memory, and the afterlife, makes no mention of Zembla and its deposed monarch. “It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana—but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and the unique atmosphere of my kingdom.”

Aghast, Kinbote sets about reinstating all the precious material excluded by Shade. The resultant “commentary”—which includes a hair-raising narrative of the king’s escape across Zembla’s Bera mountain range, a blow-by-blow account of a bungled assassination plot, learned asides on Zemblan history (with special focus on the members of its royal family), and plenty else besides—is perhaps the most entertaining two hundred pages of fiction ever written. Like a greedy man at the buffet over-filling his plate, Kinbote can’t help larding his prose with one more personal disclosure, and then another, and another. A typical note begins:

Line 130: I never bounced a ball or swung a bat Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket; I am a passable horseman, a vigorous though unorthodox skier, a good skater, a tricky wrestler, and an enthusiastic mountain climber.

Given the ludic vitality of Kinbote’s portions of the book, it is not surprising that Shade’s subtle, meticulously wrought poem should have received short shrift. Most readers tend to think of the poem as the grace that must be perfunctorily said before we sit down to the meal of the commentary. It is this imbalance that a new edition of “Pale Fire” seeks to redress. In a move that is likely to irritate and scandalize many, Gingko Press has lifted Shade’s poem from Nabokov’s novel and published it as a separate book. (They are not, incidentally, the first to have done this.)

That’s not all, however. The new edition, housed in a deluxe, cloth-bound, fold-out box, also contains a “facsimile” of Shade’s manuscript which accords with the description Kinbote provides in his foreword: “eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto.”

In one respect, the Gingko Press “Pale Fire” is a fetishist’s dream, an extravagant plaything to be unpacked and fondled with glee. (Nabokov: “One should notice and fondle details.”) In another, it is a serious statement about how seriously we ought to take Nabokov’s longest and most ambitious piece of verse. The new edition also comes with a svelte booklet containing two essays, by the Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and the distinguished poet R. S. Gwynn, both of which argue passionately for the aesthetic splendor and autonomy of “Pale Fire” the poem.

“We have not paid Shade and his poem the respect, the care in reading, they deserve,” Boyd writes, before launching into an intimidatingly rigorous formal analysis that includes sentences such as this one: “Within and between quatrains, [Nabokov] amasses phonic repetitions: the ss and ws of quatrain 1, the ‘silent thought … sigh … sought’ echoed by quatrain 2’s ‘sight,’ the ‘thought … thing … thing … sought’ echoed in the couplet’s ‘think,’ and the first line’s ‘_sil_ent thought’ answered in the penultimate line’s ‘wh_il_e I think.’ ” (Boyd’s toiling italics.)

Gwynn, taking a more literary historical approach, argues that the rise of “confessional” poets like Lowell, Plath, and Sexton in the nineteen-fifties created a critical climate hostile to Nabokov’s coy and playful verse. (“Pale Fire” was published in 1962.) “With the publication of Lolita,” Gwynn writes, “Nabokov had been hailed as a master of English prose and of the American idiom as well; it is not much of a leap of faith to suspect that this ambitious poem by the most competitive of authors was an attempt to establish himself as firmly in the canon of American poetry as he had done in prose. His failure to do so has little to do with the quality of the poem; it is more a function of a period during which American poetry was in the process of redefining itself.”