Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont on September 23, 1952. Ray Bradbury's science fiction story The Veldt originally appeared as The World the Children Made in the September 23, 1950, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It was republished under its current name in the 1951 anthology The Illustrated Man.

Describing Gradus’ activities in Paris, 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 Zule Bretwit, Oswin's grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his, Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros:

According to Boris Ivanovich Shchyogolev, a character (Fyodor's landlord, Zina Mertz's stepfather) in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), if he had time, he would write a novel:

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he writes Lolita in legal captivity (a New York gaol). Describing the prison library, Humbert Humbert mentions A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie:

Describing Gradus’ day in New York, 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 agate type in which the Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry:"

At the end of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) compares our childhood memories to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:

When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) describes his nights in “Ardis the First,” Ada takes over and mentions the song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress:

At the beginning of VN's novel Pnin (1957) the narrator mentions Pnin's conservative black Oxfords (formal, lace-up dress shoes defined by "closed lacing," meaning the shoelace eyelet tabs are stitched underneath the front part of the shoe):

At the beginning of VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin senior, the writer of books for boys, would be rapping with feigned interest po steklu barometra (on the barometer dial), where the hand always stood at storm: