Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving:

Now I shall speak... Better than any soap

Is the sensation for which poets hope

When inspiration and its icy blaze,

The sudden image, the immediate phrase

Over the skin a triple ripple send

Making the little hairs all stand on end

As in the enlarged animated scheme

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving:

Now I shall speak... Better than any soap

Is the sensation for which poets hope

When inspiration and its icy blaze,

The sudden image, the immediate phrase

Over the skin a triple ripple send

Making the little hairs all stand on end

As in the enlarged animated scheme

According to 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), the eye of the mind sees Gradus, and the muscles of the mind feel him, as always streaking across the sky with black traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained glide high over sea and land:

Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

In a conversation at the Faculty Club John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that one of the four people whom he has been said to resemble is the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria:

In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”).

The name of one of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer), seems to hint at Gradus ad Parnassum, the title of a dictionary of prosody used in English public schools for centuries as a guide to Roman poetry. In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus was the home of the Muses and sacred to Apollo (the Greek and Roman god of music, prophecy, healing, archery, and the sun/light). The pantheon of twelve Greek gods resided atop Mount Olympus.

A linguist by necessity, Timofey Pnin (the title character of VN's novel Pnin, 1957) tells Joan Clements (Pnin's landlady in Waindell) that water in Turkish is su:

Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, 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) mentions lazy Garh, the farmer's daughter who showed to the king the shortest way to the pass:

In his Foreword and Commentary to Shade's poem 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) mentions a distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag:

Describing his first physical contact with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the picture in Lolita's magazine: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand: