Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Armande tells Julia that 'snowdrift' cannot be rafale in French and rafalovich in Russian:

Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to "impress" her Russian friends. Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.

In the Kalugano hospital where Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Dr Fitzbishop congratulates Van on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person meets Mr. R. (the writer who lives in his house at Diablonnet) in Versex, in a hotel:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Mr. R. lives at Diablonnet, near Versex:

In his poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by 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) in his Commentary Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul that lures the pale moths of starless nights:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person’s wife Armande calls her mother, to her face, skotina ("brute"):

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Mr. R.’s publisher receives Mr. R.’s last letter on the day of Mr. R.’s death:

Dear Phil,

This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably.

The main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972), Hugh Person dies in a hotel fire. Describing Hugh Person's death, the spectral narrators in VN's novel mention the orgasm of art that courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic:

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) revisits Switzerland in 1965, he experiences a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see a hotel in which he had stayed with his father ten years ago:

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) first meets Armande, she has a book, the paperback edition of Mr. R.’s novel Figures in a Golden Window, in her lap: