Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

After murdering Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) wonders if some surgeon of genius might not revive his victim:

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions his good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. (Humbert Humbert’s lawyer):

Describing his first night with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the key in his hot hairy fist:

When Andrey Vinelander (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Ada’s husband) falls ill, his sister Dorothy reads to him old issues of Golos Feniksa (“The Phoenix Voice,” a Russian-language newspaper in Arizona):

In his Index entry on Botkin, V. 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) renders the obsolete word botelyi (fat, stout, obese, corpulent) as “big-bellied.” This epithet brings to mind tolstopuzyi (pot-bellied), a word used by Pushkin in the first line of his poem Rumyanyi kritik moy, nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (“My

In Kinbote's Index to Shade's poem there is the following entry:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls the little scissors with which he pares his fingernails “a dazzling synthesis of sun and star:”

The little scissors I am holding are

A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

At the end of his Commentary 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) says that he may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art:

"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.

In his essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (1956) VN says that the name of the protagonist in his story Volshebnik ("The Enchanter," 1939), the Russian precursor to Lolita (1955), was Arthur:

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls 1958 “a year of Tempests” and mentions Mars:

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)