Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

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, 28 June 1949, is hospitalized in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains). Describing Lolita's hospitalization, Humbert Humbert mentions Dr Blue (the chief physician at the Elphinstone hospital) and a sparrow perching on the saddle of the landlady's bike:

A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty tells Humbert Humbert that he has a funny accent:

A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty tells Humbert Humbert "You have a funny accent, Captain:"

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) outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter and mentions those almost unruffled evenings when he played mah-jongg with his wife and daughter:

She was my darling - difficult, morose -

But still my darling. You remember those

Almost unruffled evenings when we played

Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made

Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,

The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,

In a conversation at the Faculty Club 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) says that the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers:"

The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert is afraid that his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother) will bundle off Lolita to St. Algebra:

There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake - not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.

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: