Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his first night on Admiral Tobakoff, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot:

In his Commentary 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 a canceled entry in his diary, "promnad vespert mid J. S.":

In VN's novel Ada (1969) Van's and Ada's parents and their half-sister Lucette are destroyed by three different elements:

Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)

Describing the last years of his long life, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) calls himself "this strange, friendless, rather repulsive nonagenarian:"

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), Jakob Gradus (Shade’s murderer) also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus:

At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" G. A. Vronsky’s joke about a telegraph pole causes Marina (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother who had a secret fondness for salty jokes) to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï):

And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).

In his Commentary 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) quotes Arnor’s poem about a miragarl (mirage girl), for which a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give tri stana verbalala (three hundred camels) ut tri phantana (and three fountains):

Describing the years of his enforced separation from Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions his works that he composed in various places:

He traveled, he studied, he taught.

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about his dead daughter. Asking her mother what this or that word means, Hazel Shade mentions the word sempiternal:   

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 his Commentary and Index 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 the king Thurgus the Third, surnamed The Turgid (grandfather of Charles the Beloved), and his mistress Iris Acht (a celebrated actress):