Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp:”

While snubbing gods, including the big G,

Iph borrowed some peripheral debris

From mystic visions; and it offered tips

(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -

How not to panic when you're made a ghost:

In the Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Lolita tells Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) how she was debauched in Camp Q and mentions Onyx and Eryx (two small lakes in the wood):

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he spent the period from September 1951 to June 1952 in Cantrip College, four hundred miles away from New York:

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), his tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house:"

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), Professor Blue (the college astronomer mentioned by Shade in Canto Two and Canto Three of his poem) was nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle:

Describing an amnesiac person whom he and Rita discovered in their hotel room sleeping in their bed, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) exclaims: "Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!":

At the end of his manuscript Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions prophetic sonnets:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his daughter and says that she twisted words:

                                   She twisted words: pot, top

Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."

She called you a didactic katydid.

She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,

In his 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) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (Shakespeare’s Zemblan translator) composed directly in English:

Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire. 

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls his odd muse “my versipel:”

Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam

Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb

Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon

I eat my egg with. In the afternoon

You drive me to the library. We dine

At half past six. And that odd muse of mine,