Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes the night of his daughter's tragic death. On that fatal night, Hazel Shade's parents watched TV and Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) played “network roulette:”

In his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his colleague, Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann:

Describing his travels with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that Rita proposed playing Russian roulette with his automatic:

In the last days of May (presumably, on May 28) 1947 thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) comes to Ramsdale (a small town in New England), falls in love with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) and, a month later, marries Lolita's mother Charlotte.

In VN's novel Pnin (1957), Timofey Pnin mentions Turgenev who was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants and the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy who liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with red noz:

Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley (a small University town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) quotes a so-called Column for Teens that he used to read in the Beardsley Star:

I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!

Describing his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the plurality of inhabited worlds:

Describing the Shadows (a regicidal organization), 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) mockingly calls Gradus (Shade's murderer who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered) "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus:"

The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1952), Humbert Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) dated September 18, 1952, on September 22, 1952:

I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down - when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice:

Dear Dad:

In his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Humbert Humbert's singing violin: