Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen calls Kim Beauharnais’s album “the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre:”

According to the hero of VN’s story That in Aleppo Once… (1943), he fell in love with his wife at first touch:

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 his letter to V. the hero of VN’s story That in Aleppo Once… (1943) compares himself to that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described:

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.

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1947) the boy’s inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1947) the boy’s inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees:

In his Commentary to Shade’s poem 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) mentions The Merman, a fine old melodrama which, according to Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the King to escape from Zembla), had not been performed for at least three decades:

In the Russian version (1967) of VN’s novel Lolita (1955) “Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone” becomes pod znakom Serebryanoy Shpory, v Elfinstone: