Description
Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale Fire, Ada and other Nabokov works here.
At the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) complains that Jones’ pant made his soup ripple:
Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that the alcohol was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what Demon (Van’s and Ada’s father) gallicistically called condemned doors:
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 first two lines of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) in Zemblan translation:
Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind
When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) and Greg Erminin meet in Paris, Van asks Greg if his wife, born Maude Sween, is the daughter of the poet:
According to Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father), Norbert von Miller (“the Black Miller”) has a head like a kegelkugel:
According to Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Norbert von Miller is echt deutsch:
At the end of VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen calls Ada “a truly unusual gamine:”
Describing his convalescence after a stroke, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions Reality:
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), to the King’s question "how long will you be absent" the guard replied "yeg ved ik [I know not]:"
When Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) refuses to leave her ill husband, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) hopes that Andrey (who has tuberculosis) will live only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting):