Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his enforced twelve-year-long separation (1893-1905) from Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the pyramids of Ladorah and Lake Van:

He traveled, he studied, he taught.

Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized on Tuesday, June 28: 

As they watch Kim Beauharnais's album, Ada tells Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969), "No more destruction, Van. Only love:" 

But what about the rare radiance on those adored lips? Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture:

Describing his childhood, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the splendid Hotel Mirana that revolved around him as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside:

During her second road trip with Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) across the USA, Lolita falls ill and on Tuesday, June 28, 1949, is hospitalized in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains). Describing his visits to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions poor Bluebeard and roly-poly Romeo: 

The entries from a comparatively recent (1946) Who's Who in the Limelight that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) finds in the prison library begin with "Pym, Roland:"

Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the words of the author of Dark Age (Clare Quilty) "wine, wine, wine, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time:"

The narrator and main character in VN's novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934), Hermann Karlovich dislikes the word zerkalo (Russ., mirror):

At the end of VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) the hero falls down to his death from the bathroom window of a Berlin flat rented by his father-in-law:

At the beginning of VN's novel Camera Obscura (1933) Cheepy, the charming guinea pig painted by Robern Horn, a gifted but unprincipled cartoonist (who in Laughter in the Dark, the novel's 1938 English version, becomes Axel Rex), holds in its paws the skull of a rodent (labeled Cavia cobaja) and exclaims "poor Yorick!":