Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing the games that Ada invented and that she wants him to play with her, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares the arms of a linden that stretched toward those of an oak to a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze:

On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:

According to 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), King Alfin's question "What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot:

In VN's novel Otchayanie ("Despair," 1934) Hermann mentions his wife's institutskie furirchiki v podushku (school-dormitory habit of having the giggles in bed):

According to 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), when King Charles saw Disa for the first time, she was dressed as a Tirolese boy:

According to 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), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:

I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man'
In Spanish... 

One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme - and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)

In a conversation at the Faculty Club John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that one of the four people whom he has been said to resemble is the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria - to which Professor Pardon remarks that she looks like Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord who is on sabbatical in England), especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner:

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 his landlord’s four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee):

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 large picture of Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord who resembles a Medusa-locked hag) and his wife (who resembles Malenkov):

Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith 

At the end of his short poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his commentary to Shade's poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions "the torments of a Tamerlane, the roar of tyrants torn in hell:"

In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his life in Berlin in the 1920s and in Paris in the late 1930s and compares Sirin (VN’s Russian nom de plume) to a meteor that passed across the dark sky of exile and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness: