Description
Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale Fire, Ada and other Nabokov works here.
Explaining to her little nephew the rules of chess, Luzhin’s aunt calls the bishops “Officers” and the knights, “Horses:”
Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Valentinov (Luzhin’s tutor and manager) tells to the twenty-year-old Luzhin (who came out a victor in a chess tournament in London, the first after the war) “Bleshchi, poka bleshchetsya” (“Shine while you can”):
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin makes the acquaintance of his future wife at a German resort, a month after his father’s death. To the girl’s question how long he had been playing chess Luzhin replies "Eighteen years, three months and four days:"
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin gets married on a November day:
At the beginning of VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (The Luzhin Defense, 1930) little Luzhin finds a mysterious sweetness in the fact that a long number, arrived at with difficulty, at the decisive moment, after many adventures, is divided by nineteen without any remainder:
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin gets married on Thursday, November 29, 1928, and commits suicide 84 days (twelve weeks) later, on Thursday, February 21, 1929:
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin gets married on a November day:
At the beginning of VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (The Luzhin Defense, 1930) little Luzhin writes dictations ('Being born in this world is hardly to be borne'):
The action in VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (The Luzhin Defense, 1930) begins on Saturday, August 28, 1910 (OS), Leo Tolstoy’s eighty-second birthday. Tolstoy is the author of Voskresenie ("Resurrection," 1899). Voskresen’ye is Russian for “Sunday.” In VN's play Sobytie ("The Event," 1938) the action takes place on Sunday, August 28, 1938. The play’s main character, the portrait painter Troshcheykin, has the same name and patronymic as Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (Maxim Gorky’s real name).
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) the word partiya (match) keeps floating through the brain of Luzhin’s wife after the wedding: