Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing the beginning of his life-long romance with Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Ben Wright, the English coachman in "Ardis the First" who was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse) home from the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore:

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) enters the kitchen, Lolita's eyes rise to meet his with a kind of celestial vapidity:

Describing the first night after the death of his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to the vulture and Lolita to a precious lamb:

The epigraph to VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) is from Discours sur les ombres by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande:

Comme un fou se croit Dieu

nous nous croyons mortels.

Delalande. Discours sur les ombres

Describing his life in Paris in the 1930s with his first wife Valeria, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions "Mr. Taxovich" (as Humbert calls the man for whom Valeria left him):

According to Clare Quilty, 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, he has made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century sexcapades:

In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), the title of Shade's poem is borrowed from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. The last king of Zembla (a distant northern land), Charles the Beloved takes into exile as a talisman a tiny volume of Timon Afinsken (Shakespeare's play in Conmal's translation):

Telling Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) that she wants to leave Beardsley and go for a long trip again, Lolita says that this time she will choose the route and uses the phrase "C’est entendu?  (That's settled?):"

In a conversation with Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) 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) speaks of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and quotes Cocteau:

Describing his life in Paris with Valeria (his first wife), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to Jean-Paul Marat (a French radical journalist, 1743-1793, who was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday):