Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 20 March, 2024

In "Wanted," a poem composed by Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him, there is a French stanza:

 

L’autre soir un air froid d’opéra m’alita:  

Son félé - bien fol est qui s’y fie! 

Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita! 

Lolita, qu’ai-je fait de ta vie? (2.25)

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 18 March, 2024

In March 1905 Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father, Van mentions The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin (an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith) by Kithar K. L. Sween (a friend of Milton Eliot, the real estate magnate):

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 16 March, 2024

Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the words of the author of Dark Age "wine, wine, wine, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time:"

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 14 March, 2024

During Van's conversation with Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) Demon says that he he is not concerned with semantics — or semination and Van asks Demon not to use philistine epithets:

 

The most protracted of the several pauses having run its dark course, Demon’s voice emerged to say, with a vigor that it had lacked before:

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 13 March, 2024

During her visit to Kingston (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's American University) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who brings Van a letter from Ada) tells Van that she can swear by William Shakespeare that she is a virgin:

 

‘Van, it will make you smile’ [thus in the MS. Ed.].

‘Van,’ said Lucette, ‘it will make you smile’ (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled), ‘but if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.’

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 8 March, 2024

At the end of May, 1947, thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her, because on the eve McCoo's house was destroyed by fire: