Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his first meeting with Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962), Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions his vegetarianism:

For the flight to France Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) wears a scarlet-silk-lined black cape:

In VN's play Izobretenie Val'sa ("The Waltz Invention," 1938) Salvator Waltz wants the architect to build a fairy-tale palace for him in ten days:  

Гриб. Видите ли, ваше... ваше сиятельство, я, собственно, архитектор.

Вальс. А... так бы сразу и сказали. Глупое недоразумение. Мне от него захотелось есть. Отлично. Вам уже сообщили, что мне нужно?

Гриб. Вам нужен дворец.

The title of VN’s story Time and Ebb (1944) seems to hint at “thy ebb and flow” in P. B. Shelley’s poem Time (1821):

Could Alamillo in Time and Ebb be suggested to Nabokov by his contemporary the mexican general Luis Alamillo (born in 1904) military attache in Washington DC and Paris around the time of that short story writing?

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov wants to let the dappled voices, the bird calls, filter through his being and to enter for a moment into a passerby’s soul as one enters the cool shade of a tree:

In VN's story The Vane Sisters (1951) the spirit of Leo Tolstoy appears at a sèance arranged by Cynthia (Sybil’s elder sister):

At the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) rents a room under a false name (Boucher):

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov tries to show to David how to pitch a pebble so as to have it glance off the water’s surface:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) two gypsy courtesans predict to Van that he will never have children: