Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In VN's play Izobretenie Val'sa ("The Waltz Invention," 1938) Salvator Waltz wants the architect to build a fairy-tale palace for him in ten days:  

Гриб. Видите ли, ваше... ваше сиятельство, я, собственно, архитектор.

Вальс. А... так бы сразу и сказали. Глупое недоразумение. Мне от него захотелось есть. Отлично. Вам уже сообщили, что мне нужно?

Гриб. Вам нужен дворец.

The title of VN’s story Time and Ebb (1944) seems to hint at “thy ebb and flow” in P. B. Shelley’s poem Time (1821):

Could Alamillo in Time and Ebb be suggested to Nabokov by his contemporary the mexican general Luis Alamillo (born in 1904) military attache in Washington DC and Paris around the time of that short story writing?

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov wants to let the dappled voices, the bird calls, filter through his being and to enter for a moment into a passerby’s soul as one enters the cool shade of a tree:

In VN's story The Vane Sisters (1951) the spirit of Leo Tolstoy appears at a sèance arranged by Cynthia (Sybil’s elder sister):

At the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) rents a room under a false name (Boucher):

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov tries to show to David how to pitch a pebble so as to have it glance off the water’s surface:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) two gypsy courtesans predict to Van that he will never have children:

Describing his tryst with Ada in the vicinity of Ardis Hall, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River:

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Paris is also known as Lute:

In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)