Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the details of the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen: 

In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) the number 342 reappears three times. 342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where they spend their first night together). Between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert registers (if not actually stays) at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. The number 342 seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth, and the second planets of the Solar System).

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) finally tracks down Clare Quilty (the playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), Quilty offers Humbert an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere:

In a little poem that he composed for Rita Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) "the blue hotel:"

Describing his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says that the same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into Annabel's house and his, in two widely separated countries: 

In his recent note in The Nabokovian, "Lolita, Blue Birds and Ovid," Gerard de Vries argues that, after her death in childbed in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest, Lolita is turned into a bird (namely, into a bluebird). In his poem Obraz tvoy, muchitel'nyi i zybkiy ("Your image, painful and unsteady," 1912) Osip Mandelshtam compares God's name that flew out of his chest to bol'shaya ptitsa (a big bird):

Nobody answers the bell, when Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) visits Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita’s married name) in Coalmont:

The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) and his neighbor, a fellow with only one arm:

I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door.

In a dialogue on the porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a stranger tells Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) that his child needs a lot of sleep and that sleep is a rose, as the Persians say:

During Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's second road trip across the USA, Lolita (the title character of a novel, 1955, by VN) is hospitalized in Elphinstone and abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty (the playwright who tells the staff that he is Lolita's uncle):