Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his rented house, 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) mentions a note in the icebox warning with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein:

When Gradus (Shade’s murderer in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) visits Villa Libitina in Switzerland, Joe Lavender (the villa’s owner) mistakes Gradus for a reporter and calls him over the ’phone “a mucking snooping son of a bitch:”

When Gradus (Shade’s murderer in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) visits Villa Libitina in Switzerland, Joe Lavender (the villa’s owner) mistakes Gradus for a reporter and calls him over the ’phone “a mucking snooping son of a bitch:”

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his visit to Mrs. Z. (who saw a tall white mountain during her heart attack) and, at the end of the Canto, mentions some faint hope:

Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is

My firm conviction - "Darling, shut the door.

Had a nice trip?" Splendid - but what is more

Describing the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a ‘talisman’ that Greg Erminin had brought Ada from his very sick father on the previous day:

When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Andrey Vinelander, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls her "Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis:"

As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), he boarded Admiral Tobakoff, a ship that had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce, at Old Hantsport:

In 1901 Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). Just before they part, Van remarks that Greg is using his British title:

Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform ‘my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.

Revisiting Ardis in 1888, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) brings Ada a diamond necklace but then tears it apart in fury:

Leaving his post, naked Van went through the clothes he had shed. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room.

Her glance swept the floor.

‘What a shame —’ she began.

Describing Ada’s allusions to her affairs of the flesh, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions cockamaroo (Russian ‘biks’), played with a toy cue on the billiard cloth of an oblong board with holes and hoops, bells and pins among which the ping-pong-sized eburnean ball zigzagged with bix-pix concussions: