Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions a story in a magazine about a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand:

It was a story in a magazine

About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been

Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.

She told her interviewer of "The Land

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) likes to have her hair done in the open so as to forestall the zephyrs:

Describing King Victor’s last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions an ironic Hesperus that rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky:

Describing King Victor’s last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a line composed by Seneca that King Victor wrote in the Shell Pink Book:

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:

Describing Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the architect’s nephew and heir, an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen:

Describing the suicide of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of his, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares Aqua to a Russian country girl lakomyashchayasya yagodami (feasting on berries):

In his farewell letter to Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) mentions his crumpled wings:

Describing the death of Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Van Veen mentions his ‘verbal’ nightmare and says that to die is a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl:

Describing the death of his, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the dyakon’s rich growl on the ambon:

Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.