Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing a conversation at the Faculty Club, 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) calls one of the interlocutors “Pink:”

In the epilogue of VN’s novel Ada (1969) old Van and Ada wonder who of them dies first:

In Canto Three of his poem Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Hurricane Lolita that swept from Florida to Maine:

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of two methods of composing, A and B:

Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, 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 the baton of life passed to him by Shade in a sublime relay race:

Near the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)

In Canto Three of his poem Shade calls 1958 "a year of Tempests:"

In her note "Judge Goldsworth: Arcady's Arcane Landlord" in The Nabokovian (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35564) Mary Ross links Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote's landlord in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), to Saturn. In a canceled variant of Four: XLIII: 1-4 of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions lysoe Saturna temya (the bald pate of Saturn):

В глуши что делать в это время

Гулять? — Но голы все места

Как лысое Сатурна темя

Иль крепостная нищета.

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions “a sustained low hum of harmony:”

Gently the day has passed in a sustained

Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained

And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

To use but did not, dry on the cement.

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon

A feeling of fantastically planned,

Describing his ten secret trysts with Ada in Mont Roux, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) “Desdemonia:”