Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The characters in VN’s novel Lolita (1955) include Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital. Clare Quilty and Coalmont (a small mining town where Lolita, now married to Dick Schiller and big with child, lives with her husband) bring to mind Claire Clairmont (1798-1879), the stepsister of English writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra.

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) outlived Humbert by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

During her second road trip with Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) across the USA Lolita falls ill and on June 28, 1949, is hospitalized in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains):

As she speaks to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) and his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Jean Farlow mentions her dogs Cavall and Melampus:

From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things.

“You scared us,” said Charlotte.

In his Foreword 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 two charming identical twins:

Describing his plans to marry Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls himself "Humbert the Cubus" (a play on "incubus," a word used by Humbert at the end of the preceding paragraph):

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:

In VN's novel Lolita (1955), John Ray, Jr.'s Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript ends as follows:

On the pillared porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a stranger tells Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) that his child needs a lot of sleep and that sleep is a rose, as the Persians say:

Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says that he has but followed nature and calls himself "nature’s faithful hound:"