Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his journey with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) on Admiral Tobakoff, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse:

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:

When she visits Van at Kingston, Lucette (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) calls Van moya radost’ ("my joy") and mentions skeletiki (“little skeletons,” as Lucette calls her cheekbones):

‘My joy (moya radost’),’ said Lucette — just like that; he had expected more formality: all in all he had hardly known her before — except as an embered embryo.

Describing Ada’s face, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that her features possessed such a softness of outline that a mawkish admirer might well have imagined the pale plume of a reed, that unthinking man — pascaltrezza — shaping her profile:

Describing his life with Cordula de Prey in her Manhattan penthouse apartment, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares his work on Letters from Terra (Van’s first novel) to pregnancy and childbearing:

Describing his love-makings with Ada in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the ogon’, the agony of supreme ‘reality:’

Describing Daniel Veen’s triple trip round the globe, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle, 1969) mentions a dove hole marked RE AMOR and a silver salver:

Describing the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century and the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Faragod (apparently, the god of electricity):

In his lecture on dreams Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions J. W. Dunne (the author of An Experiment with Time, 1927):

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the guide who goes on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade: