Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 28 April, 2025

The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada), by the L disaster (that happened on Demonia in the beau milieu of the 19th century) he does not mean Elevated:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 26 April, 2025

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood and, at the end of the Canto, mentions his fainting fits:

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

I had a brain, five senses (one unique);

But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.

In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps

But really envied nothing - save perhaps

The miracle of a lemniscate left

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 26 April, 2025

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions his wife’s portrait by Lang:

 

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 25 April, 2025

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), the King escaped from Zembla clad in bright red clothes. A policeman in Blawick asks the King (whom the policeman mistakes for an impostor impersonating the King) to take off his red fufa and red cap:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 23 April, 2025

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions some kind of link-and-bobolink that he could find in life:

 

Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,

And stop investigating my abyss?

But all at once it dawned on me that this

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream