the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. 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. A 2009 paper also compares Pale Fire to hypertext. The first Russian translation of the novel, one created by Véra Nabokov, its dedicatee, was published in 1983 by Ardis in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Alexei Tsvetkov initially played an important role in this translation). After Nabokov's reputation was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union (his novels started being published there in 1986 and the first book composed entirely of Nabokov's works was printed in 1988), Pale Fire was published in 1991 in Sverdlovsk (in Sergei Ilyin's Russian translation). 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. Its title is taken from William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Interpretations Some readers concentrate on the apparent story, focusing on traditional aspects of fiction such as the relationship among the characters. In 1997, Brian Boyd published a much-discussed study arguing that the ghost of John Shade influenced Kinbote's contributions. He expanded this essay into a book in which he also argues that, in order to trigger Shade's poem, Hazel Shade's ghost induced Kinbote to recount his Zemblan delusions to Shade. Some readers, starting with Mary McCarthy and including Boyd, Nabokov's annotator Alfred Appel, and D. Barton Johnson, see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, stating in an interview in 1962 (the novel's year of publication) that Pale Fire "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman." The novel's intricate structure of teasing cross-references leads readers to this "plum". The Index, supposedly created by Kinbote, features an entry for a "Botkin, V.," describing this Botkin as an "American scholar of Russian descent"—and referring to a note in the Commentary on line 894 of Shade's poem, in which no such person is directly mentioned