---
title: "Augustine in the margin: “Not me”"
description: "Following a dubious quotation in Pale Fire led me to a medieval manuscript where a drawn author objects to words attributed to him."
date: 2026-10-19
lang: en
translationKey: "nabokov-in-the-margins"
translationStatus: machine
tags: ["books", "language", "marginalia"]
related: ["fly-poetry", "voice-message-preview"]
sourceUrls: ["https://t.me/Shipao/2488", "https://mtc-journal.org/index.php/mtc/article/download/9/54?inline=1", "https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/36/3/298/6658581"]
canonical: "https://shipulin.md/en/blog/nabokov-in-the-margins/"
---

Nabokov's *Pale Fire* — a novel about misinterpreting a text — naturally quotes Saint Augustine: the man who invented the very method of interpreting texts. And naturally, it misquotes him (it is actually Thomas Aquinas)[^eklund], because the novel is about misinterpretation.

That alone would have been enough to make the face Jonah Hill makes in *War Dogs*, but it gets worse.

Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge — the very place that holds a page from a twelfth-century manuscript of Peter Lombard's commentary on the Psalms. The commentary is about as peculiar as *Pale Fire* itself: it presents 7 different texts at once — the Psalms themselves, two translations, Peter's commentaries, commentaries on the commentaries, quotations and cross-references, all in different colours and with different kinds of underlining, like a first-year student's notebook.[^smith]

One of the marginalia (notes in the margins) gives Saint Augustine's interpretation of a tricky passage. Later, someone will draw Augustine himself in the margin beside it, pointing at his own quotation and saying: “I never wrote that.”

He really didn't, because the quotation is false, and the interpretation is false, and not a soul in the world knows about it except Nabokov, laughing his head off in the afterlife, me, who spent a Sunday evening on this investigation, and you, dear reader who has made it this far.[^post]

---

Useful materials:

1. [An article about the manuscript's intricate system of references](https://mtc-journal.org/index.php/mtc/article/download/9/54?inline=1)
2. [A screenshot of the manuscript page](https://t.me/Shipao/2488)
3. [A screenshot of Augustine with the caption “Not me” — “Non ego”](https://t.me/Shipao/2488)
4. [Jonah Hill's face in *War Dogs*](https://t.me/Shipao/2488)

[^post]: [My original note, 2026](https://t.me/Shipao/2488).
[^eklund]: Erik Eklund, [“The Name of God Has Priority”: “God” and the Apophatic Element in Vladimir Nabokov’s *Pale Fire*](https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/36/3/298/6658581), *Literature and Theology*, 2022.
[^smith]: Lesley Smith, [Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.5.4, folio 135v: the Psalms, with commentary by Peter Lombard](https://mtc-journal.org/index.php/mtc/article/download/9/54?inline=1), *Manuscript and Text Cultures*, 2023. The article explains the manuscript's layout and the figure saying Non ego.