Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the beginning of Verlaine's sonnet Nevermore (1866), "Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? (Remembrance, remembrance, what do you want of me?):"

VN's novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) begins with a prefatory family tree (here it is in Italian):

According to Ada, Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) called Dorothy Vinelander (Ada’s sister-in-law) l'impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy:

‘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.’

The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Charlotte Haze, née Becker, Lolita's mother whom Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) marries in order to get access to her daughter. Humbert calls his late wife (who died under the wheels of a truck) "adult Lotte:"

Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Dunkerque (Dunkirk, "church in the dunes"), an ancient fishing village (now a small coastal town) in northern France:

In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert Humbert in Russian spelling) calls Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Gumbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) Klariy Novus:

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood fit when he felt distributed through space and time and says that his foot was upon a mountaintop: 

                                A thread of subtle pain,

Tugged at by playful death, released again,

But always present, ran through me. One day,

When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay

Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy -

Describing the King’s escape from Zembla (and then again at the end of his commentary), 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 a red-capped Steinmann:

Describing the king's escape from Zembla, 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 northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness):

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes Aunt Maud's room and mentions the paperweight of convex glass enclosing a lagoon: