Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

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), he is known on the campus as the Great Beaver:

In a conversation at the Faculty Club Professor Pardon (a character in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tries to pronounce the name Pnin:

Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"

Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter and says that she had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character:

She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force

Of character - as when she spent three nights

Investigating certain sounds and lights

In an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top,

Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."

She called you a didactic katydid.

After Van's first summer at Ardis, Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) tells Van that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) never realized Armina was an anagram of the sea, not of her:

In the dining room of The Enchanted Hunters (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Lolita draws Humbert's attention to a lone diner who resembles Clare Quilty, the writer fellow in the Dromes ad:

After 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) realizes that Lolita is a lone child, an absolute waif:

In VN's novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:

The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Miss Pratt (headmistress of the Beardsley School for Girls) and Miss Cormorant (one of the teachers):

At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my child’s “nice blue eyes” (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that “French genius” (a genius! Gaston!) - and then, having turned Dolly over to a Miss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and said:

Describing his childhood, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares elderly American ladies leaning on their canes to towers of Pisa:

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 (the playwright) and calls Elphinstone "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?”