Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

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 eye of the mind sees Gradus (Shade's murderer), and the muscles of the mind feel him, as always streaking across the sky with black traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained glide high over sea and land:

Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

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 Bera Range and Bregberg (a city in Zembla):

Telling about the activities of Gradus (Shade's murderer) in Switzerland, 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) describes Gradus’ visit to Joe Lavender’s villa Libitina:

 

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), he is known on the campus as the Great Beaver:

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 Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter and says that she had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character:

She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force

Of character - as when she spent three nights

Investigating certain sounds and lights

In an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top,

Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."

She called you a didactic katydid.

After Van's first summer at Ardis, Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) tells Van that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) never realized Armina was an anagram of the sea, not of her:

In the dining room of The Enchanted Hunters (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Lolita draws Humbert's attention to a lone diner who resembles Clare Quilty, the writer fellow in the Dromes ad:

After his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) realizes that Lolita is a lone child, an absolute waif:

In VN's novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall: