Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale Fire, Ada and other Nabokov works here.
Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko
The characters in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) include Monsieur Wilde, a Swiss businessman to whom Hugh Person talks in the lounge of the Ascot Hotel in Witt on the eve of his death:
The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert dubs his devil "Aubrey McFate:"
In his poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his Commentary John Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul that lures the pale moths of starless nights:
In his diary Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to an inflated pale spider that sits in the middle of a luminous web and gives little jerks to this or that strand:
- Read more about web of sense in Lolita & in Pale Fire
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Describing his life with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the beautiful bluish furs that Rita had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum:
- Read more about beautiful bluish furs & Cantrip Review in Lolita
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Leaving Rita forever, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) tapes a note of tender adieu to her navel:
According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), he is nature’s faithful hound:
I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world - nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?
- Read more about nature’s faithful hound in Lolita
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In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved who report that no ghosts walk:
- Read more about Lolita as ghost novel
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Humbert's chess partner at Beardsley, Gaston Godin (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) is a namesake of Gaston Leroux (1868-1927), a French writer of detective novels, the author of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ("The Phantom of the Opera," 1909). Among the people with whose photographs Gaston Godin had decorated the sloping wall of his studio is Tchaikovski, a Russian composer (1840-93):
At Beardsley Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) plays chess with Gaston Godin (a professor of French):
- Read more about Au roi! in Lolita
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