Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Кобальтана + мировая = Набоков + Альтамира + я

(Kobaltana + mirovaya = Nabokov + Altamira + ya)

Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks, now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text. (Kinbote's Index)

The three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) 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. In Canto Four of Shade's poem there is the following couplet:

Man's life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use. (ll. 939-40)

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 a person (Shade's former literary agent) who has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned "in some peculiar kind of red ink:"

Describing his debauch à trois with Ada and Lucette in his Manhattan flat, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions a Casanovanic situation and the Venetian school:

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) calls Shade "my beloved old conjurer:"

At the end of his manuscript Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says that his story has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies:

In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1926) the action begins on Thursday, April 1, 192[6]:

Describing Shchyogolev's discussion of politics at table, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), says: "A sidel Shchyogolev na Rossii (and Russia was Shchyogolev's bottom):"

The characters in VN's novel Pnin (1957) include Oleg Komarov, a muralist in Waindell:

Describing the poltergeist phenomena in Shades’ 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 basket in which Aunt Maud had once kept her half-paralyzed Skye terrier: