Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote (one of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) is known on the campus of Wordsmith University as the Great Beaver:

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) mentions his favorite photograph of Shade and calls his young roomer who snapped the picture “bad Bob:”

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), after the death of her husband the mother of Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) moved to Strasbourg:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes the night of his daughter's tragic death. On that fatal night, Hazel Shade's parents watched TV and Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) played “network roulette:”

In his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his colleague, Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann:

Describing his travels with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that Rita proposed playing Russian roulette with his automatic:

In the last days of May (presumably, on May 28) 1947 thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) comes to Ramsdale (a small town in New England), falls in love with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) and, a month later, marries Lolita's mother Charlotte.

In VN's novel Pnin (1957), Timofey Pnin mentions Turgenev who was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants and the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy who liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with red noz:

Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley (a small University town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) quotes a so-called Column for Teens that he used to read in the Beardsley Star:

I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!

Describing his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the plurality of inhabited worlds: