Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

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

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 14 April, 2025

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions his second collection of poetry Night Rote:

 

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote

Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float

In that damp carnival, for now I term

Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 13 April, 2025

In VN's novel Ada (1969) twelve-year-old Ada confesses that she is sentimental:

 

‘I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.’

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 12 April, 2025

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 12 April, 2025

The narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovhich Godunov-Cherdyntsev would have never met and fallen in love with Zina Mertz, if he did not move to 15 Agamemnonstrasse (the Shchyogolevs' Berlin address):

 

«Здравствуйте, – сказал Федор Константинович, кланяясь телефону, – мне Александра Яковлевна…»

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 8 April, 2025

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), the King escaped from the palace by the secret passage that leads to the theater’s green room. Describing the discovery of the secret passage, Kinbote mentions the three transverse streets, Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley: