Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 29 January, 2025

In his commentary 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) calls Gradus (Shade’s murderer) “half-man who is half mad:"

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 29 January, 2025

Describing Gradus’ activities in Paris, 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 Oswin Bretwit, the former Zemblan consul in Paris:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 27 January, 2025

During one of their ten meetings in Mont Roux in October 1905 Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) tells Van (Van Veen, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) that a couple of hours after Demon's death in a mysterious airplane disaster she and her husband had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 26 January, 2025

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), Jakob 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:

 

Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 25 January, 2025

During one of their ten meetings in Mont Roux in October 1905 Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) tells Van (Van Veen, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) about her campng out in the mountains with Mayo, a cowhand:

 

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’