Pale Fire was written 1960-1961, published 1962 by Putnam, a second edition 1966 by Lancer, reprinted 1980 by Perigee. Nabokov moved to Switzerland in 1961 (where he lived out the remainder of his life), so this was his last work created in America. It was his 14th novel, the 5th in English (after The Real Life of Sebastian Knight [1941], Bend Sinister [1947], Lolita [1955], and Pnin [1957]).

Pale Fire is an "involuted" (or "self-reflexive") novel -- a novel that contains the details concerning its own origin or composition. An antecedent is Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters (1926) which is a diary kept by a novelist about a work-in-progress called The Counterfeiters (followed in the same year by Gide's Journal of The Counterfeiters, the journal he'd kept while writing the novel The Counterfeiters). There's at least one reference to Gide in Pale Fire. Another example of an involuted novel: Raymond Queneau's Les Enfants du Limon (1938). Anyone got more?

Pale Fire is a fictional academic work -- a work of mock scholarship. Some of Borges' stories come to mind. There must be others...?

And it is a work that contains another work: this makes one think of Elizabethan drama, especially Hamlet.

An antecedent for the fabula of Pale Fire may be found in Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" (1834), a narrative by a man who believes he is the King of Spain and fails to realize that nobody else shares his delusions. This opens another interpretive possibility: that Kinbote, like Gogol's Poprishchin, suffers from schizophrenia

Structurally, Pale Fire probably evolved from VN's experience translating Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1823-31), which contains a preface by Nabokov, the translated poem, a large commentary, and finally an index (supplied by VN's son Dmitri), all in proportions similar to those found in Pale Fire (although around four times the size).

But PF has more than a passing similarity to other long poems, and these have their own relation to the text:

-=T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"=-
The first five lines of which may seem particularly relevant:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

Shade even seems to adopt Eliot's style of indentation for certain verses (someone with better poetry voodoo might explain their purpose, although I recall being told it has to do with attempting to guide or ease the reader's eye through transitions).

-=Alexander Pope's "The Dunciad"=- (a pdf version)

A poem in four "books" containing a preface, the poem, a commentary, and notes, all composed by the author. Note that John Shade is a Pope scholar and a specialist in 18th century literature.

-=Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"=-

Consists of a Preface and four cantos. From the Preface: "A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece; which, however, makes no pretension to regularity."

Not that I'm trying to argue any particular point of view here.... Byron (arguably) also shows up Pale Fire.

There's also Pound's Cantos but I'm not sure VN thought much of Pound (although he didn't seem to like Eliot all that much either).

And of course Dante wrote in Cantos. Shade has a bust of Dante on his bookshelf.