Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions his wife’s portrait by Lang:

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)

Describing the King's escape from Zembla, 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 good capercaillie and woodcock shooting:

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), the King escaped from Zembla clad in bright red clothes. A policeman in Blawick asks the King (whom the policeman mistakes for an impostor impersonating the King) to take off his red fufa and red cap:

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 a catalogue raisonné of the desk's meager contents:

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions some kind of link-and-bobolink that he could find in life:

Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,

And stop investigating my abyss?

But all at once it dawned on me that this

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream

At the beginning of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, U.S.A.:

According to Ada, at the funeral of Marina (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) she met d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm:

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’

When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) visits Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital, male nurse Dorofey reads the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos):

VN's penultimate completed novel, Transparent Things (1972) revolves around the four visits of the hero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland. In a letter of August 23, 1836, from Geneva (where he arrived four days before) to his mother Gogol describes Switzerland and says that, after the sunset, the Alps alone shine on the sky as if transparantnye (a Gallicism no longer in use):

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), Dr Fitzbishop (a surgeon in the Kalugano hospital) is what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian'):