Oof, I hate these questions. Nabokov would have hated 1 as a question because Pale Fire is a sort of extended essay about this very thing, written in the voice

Oof, I hate these questions. Nabokov would have hated 1 as a question because Pale Fire is a sort of extended essay about this very thing, written in the voice of a narcissistic obsessive weirdo and providing him with a sort of chorus response as a poem. 2 feels simplistic to me as well, when asked about one of the great masters of characterization. If you ask who did he sympathize with more, then I’d say possibly ‘neither’.