Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Compared to the reality of Armande, his meeting with Mr. R. seems to Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) all sham and waxworks:

After his first meeting with Armande Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) describes her in his diary as “slender, athletic, lethal:”

In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls his odd muse “my versipel” and his last poem, “this transparent thingum:”

Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam

Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb

Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon

I eat my egg with. In the afternoon

You drive me to the library. We dine

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person meets Mr. R. (the writer who lives in his house at Diablonnet) in Versex, in a hotel (the venerable Versex Palace):

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), Gradus (Shade’s murderer) contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Armande tells Julia that 'snowdrift' cannot be rafale in French and rafalovich in Russian:

Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to "impress" her Russian friends. Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.

In the Kalugano hospital where Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Dr Fitzbishop congratulates Van on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person meets Mr. R. (the writer who lives in his house at Diablonnet) in Versex, in a hotel:

In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Mr. R. lives at Diablonnet, near Versex:

In his poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by 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 his Commentary Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul that lures the pale moths of starless nights: