Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that Lolita and nurse Mary Lore were plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against his hopeless love:

Describing his desperate attempts to find Lolita's abductor, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the taclum light and the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk:

According to Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, he is the author of fifty-two successful scenarios:

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey:

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) enters the kitchen, Lolita's eyes rise to meet his with a kind of celestial vapidity:

Describing the beginning of his life-long romance with Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Ben Wright, the English coachman in "Ardis the First" who was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse) home from the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore:

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) enters the kitchen, Lolita's eyes rise to meet his with a kind of celestial vapidity:

Describing the first night after the death of his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to the vulture and Lolita to a precious lamb:

The epigraph to VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) is from Discours sur les ombres by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande:

Comme un fou se croit Dieu

nous nous croyons mortels.

Delalande. Discours sur les ombres

Describing his life in Paris in the 1930s with his first wife Valeria, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions "Mr. Taxovich" (as Humbert calls the man for whom Valeria left him):