Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband, veteran of a remote war who is hard of hearing) and his neighbor, a fellow with only one arm:

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

Describing his life in Paris in the 1930s, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares Monique (a young Parisian prostitute) to a bird:

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), he seems to share with people in movies the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god:

Describing his travels with Rita (a girl whom he picked up one depraved May evening in 1950, at a roadside bar between Montreal and New York), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions some fugitive rhymes that he strung together to amuse her:

Describing his childhood, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the splendid Hotel Mirana that revolved around him as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside:

In VN's novel Lolita (1955) the list of Lolita's classmates in Ramsdale school includes Stella Fantasia (adorable Stella who has let strangers touch her). On 24 September 1952 (the day on which Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale), Murphy marries Fantasia:

One of the chapters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) ends in the sentence "But there was no Charlotte in the living room:"

Describing the king's arrival in America, 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) says that Sylvia O'Donnell inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son (Odon, the world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla) was said to be living in sin: 

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont, she tells him about her life after her escape from the Elphinstone hospital with Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer) and calls Elphinstone (a small town in the Rockies) "Elephant:"

“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.

“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”