Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Leaving Ardis after his first summer there, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) asks Bouteillan (the French butler at Ardis) not to quote Delille to him:

Van’s black trunk and black suitcase, and black king-size dumbbells, were heaved into the back of the family motorcar; Bouteillan put on a captain’s cap, too big for him, and grape-blue goggles; ‘remouvez votre bottom, I will drive,’ said Van — and the summer of 1884 was over.

Describing Ada’s dramatic career, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly:

In VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) July 5 is the birthday of the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). In Hodasevich’s story Zhizn' Vasiliya Travnikova ("The Life of Vasiliy Travnikov," 1936) July 6 is Vasiliy Travnikov’s birthday:

At the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Van calls Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) “a dirty old man” and Demon says with a sigh that he is “a dirty young man:”

Revisiting Ardis in the summer 1888, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) asks Ada if Percy de Prey (a country gentleman) is her new beau:

Describing the debauch á trois with Ada snd Lucette after the dinner in ‘Ursus,’ Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a Casanovanic situation and calls Casanova a double-wencher:

Discussing the shooting script based on Mlle Larivière’s novel Les Enfants Maudits (“The Accursed Children”), Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) puzzles over a love scene where the young chatelaine’s ‘radiant beauty’ is mentioned and asks what ‘radiant beauty’ means:

According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) promised her not to cheat the poor grubs:

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’

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) mentions the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly in which Shade’s short poem "The Nature of Electricity" appeared after the author’s death:

Investigating the phenomena in the Haunted Barn, Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) asked the luminous circlet if it were a will-o-the-wisp: