Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), he boarded Admiral Tobakoff, a ship that had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce, at Old Hantsport:

In 1901 Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). Just before they part, Van remarks that Greg is using his British title:

Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform ‘my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.

Revisiting Ardis in 1888, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) brings Ada a diamond necklace but then tears it apart in fury:

Leaving his post, naked Van went through the clothes he had shed. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room.

Her glance swept the floor.

‘What a shame —’ she began.

Describing Ada’s allusions to her affairs of the flesh, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions cockamaroo (Russian ‘biks’), played with a toy cue on the billiard cloth of an oblong board with holes and hoops, bells and pins among which the ping-pong-sized eburnean ball zigzagged with bix-pix concussions:

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), his maternal grandmother Daria (‘Dolly’) Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or:

Before he falls asleep, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) asks Ada to avoid sapphic vorschmacks with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister):

‘My dear,’ said Van, ‘do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.’

Describing a stage play in which Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) plays the heroine, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions an old nurse in Eskimo boots and the glass slipper (left by the protagonist’s fickle lady) that Baron d’O. is holding in the middle of an empty stage:

Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.

Describing the debauch á trois with Ada and Lucette in his Manhattan flat after the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a box of Wipex on the bedside table:

Describing Kim Beauharnais’s visit to Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls the album that Kim brings with him “the mud-colored scrapbook:”

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) lists swimming pools and sharks among the things he loathes:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;