Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his rented house, 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 atmosphere of damnum infectum in which he was supposed to dwell:

Describing his rented house, 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 landlord’s four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee):

Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith 

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), in a conversation with him Shade complained that Russian intellectuals lack all sense of humor:

In a conversation at the Faculty Club Professor Pardon (a character in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tries to pronounce the name Pnin:

Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"

Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].

In VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) the three main characters are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). In a conversation at the Faculty Club Pink (as Kinbote calls a professor of physics) joins in and says that History has denounced the last King of Zembla, and that is his epitaph:

The element that destroys Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions) is fire:

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. 

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 mentioned 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,

Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions kurortish Wace:

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.

During Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's second road trip across the USA, Lolita (the title character of a novel, 1955, by VN) is hospitalized in Elphinstone and abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty (the playwright who tells the hospital staff that he is Humbert's brother):

Describing his meetings with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux in October 1905, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon: