Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In his Foreword 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) describes Shade destroying his drafts and mentions the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé:

The author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript, John Ray, Jr. was awarded the Poling Prize for his modest work “Do the Senses make Sense?”:

Describing a lunch at Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls the dackel Dack “the golden-brown stoat:”

The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include Klara Stoboy, Fyodor’s landlady:

The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include Frau Stoboy, Fyodor’s landlady:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) the action takes place on the boy’s twentieth (or, perhaps, twenty-first) birthday. In his memoir essay Muni (1926) Hodasevich says that, when he and Muni met and became friends, they were only inexperienced boys of twenty or a little older and mentions les simvolov (a forest of symbols) in which they easily got lost:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) Herman Brink had called the system of the boy’s delusions “referential mania:"

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) one of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago:

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Tartary, a country that occupies the territory from Kurland to the Kuriles:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) one of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago: