Should "Pale Fire" stand alone?

By publishing the 999-line poem “Pale Fire” separate from the sprawling footnotes that make up Nabokov’s 1962 novel, editor Mo Cohen and artist Jean Holabird are setting the stage for the next big controversy/debate/yelling match among Nabokov critics and fanatics. At least, so says Ron Rosenbaum at Slate. Detailing the form and history of the poem/novel for the non-Nabokovites among us, Rosenberg explains why this new publication, “part book, part artwork, part literary manifesto,” is adding just a little more flame to the Russian author’s fire:

The box opens like a three-paneled vanity cabinet, revealing a cachelike repository that contains a delicately printed, bound pamphlet (illustrated with an image of a waxwing by Jean Holabird), which reproduces in contemporary typography the 999-line poem "Pale Fire." Pick up the booklet and you see underneath a nest of index cards, which contain the handwritten "fair copy" of the poem, just as John Shade would have left it, just as Charles Kinbote would have stolen it.

The ingenuity and complexity and the box-within-box architecture of the object thematizes, as they say, the ingenuity and complexity and Russian-doll-like construction of the novel and poem . . .