Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his plans to drown his wife Charlotte (Lolita’s mother) in Hourglass Lake, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the point of his perfect-crime parable:

Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable.

In The Enchanted Hunters (in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Lolita confesses that in the previous summer she had a lesbian relationship with Elizabeth Talbot:

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Marina, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Aqua’s letters to Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’):

According to the narrator of VN’s story Istreblenie tiranov (“Tyrants Destroyed,” 1936), laughter saved him:

According to 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), he arrived in America descending by parachute:

Revisiting Ramsdale in 1952, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) meets Mrs. Chatfield (whose daughter Phyllis was Lolita’s classmate in the Ramsdale school):

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita’s married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) mentions deified Harold Haze (Lolita’s father):

Describing the suicide of his and Ada’s half-sister Lucette, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that death is only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude:

At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) calls her husband Daniel Veen bednyachok (poor, poor little man) and remarks that Ada’s cruelty is sometimes satanic: