In the Night of the Burning Barn Van and Ada from the library window see Kim Beauharnais (the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada has bribed to set the barn on fire) walking à reculons as if taking pictures:
According to Ada (the title character of VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) is the apotheosis of “Ardis the First:”
Describing his stay with Lolita at Elphinstone (the city in a Western State where Lolita falls ill and is abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty), Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert Humbert in the Russian spelling) says in parenthesis: Ne day Bog nikomu uslyshat’ ikh ston (God forbid that anybody hears their moan):
At the end of his letter to V. the hero of VN's story That in Aleppo Once... (1943) quotes Othello's words "but yet the pity of it, Iago! / O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!" in Shakespeare's Othello (4.1):
In a letter of July 16, 1944, to Edmund Wilson and his wife VN mentions his brother Pavel who teaches horsemanship at a place in Maine and who has married an American girl who was together with Mary [McCarthy] at the convent.
