Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In a poem that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) makes Clare Quilty (the playwright who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) read aloud before murdering him Humbert calls himself a sinner and compares himself to Adam (the first man):

When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) in Coalmont, she tells him that Clare Quilty (the playwright with whom Lolita escaped from the Elphinstone hospital) took her to the Duk Duk Ranch:

“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.

“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”

Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) quotes a poem by François Coppée and mentions Irène de Grandfief, la pauvre et noble enfant, who sold her éléphant:

Here Ada herself came running into the room. Yes-yes-yes-yes, here I come. Beaming!

In the lift of a tall Manhattan building that brings him to Van's penthouse apartment Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) places a piece of nobler metal among the silver domes on Valerio's rolling table with breakfast for two: 

Not a belief in ghosts makes Hugh Person (the main character in VN's novel Transparent Things, 1972) revisit dreary drab Witt:

The main character in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972), Hugh Person is staying at the Ascot Hotel in Witt:

The characters in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) include Monsieur Wilde, a Swiss businessman to whom Hugh Person talks in the lounge of the Ascot Hotel in Witt on the eve of his death:

The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert dubs his devil "Aubrey McFate:"

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 John Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul that lures the pale moths of starless nights:

In his diary Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to an inflated pale spider that sits in the middle of a luminous web and gives little jerks to this or that strand: