Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

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), Gradus (Shade's murderer) might be termed a Puritan:

Line 171: a great conspiracy

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), in a conversation with him and Shade Mrs. Hurley mentioned the old man at the Exton railway station who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains:

Line 629: The fate of beasts

Above this the poet wrote and struck out:

The madman’s fate

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) quotes Shade's poem “The Nature of Electricity,” which appeared in the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly after the poet's death:

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that now he will speak of evil as none has spoken before and itemizes the things that 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;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

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), in a conversation with him Shade compared words to performing fleas: 

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), superstitiously he cannot write out the odd dark word employed by his black gardener (Balthasar, Prince of Loam, as Kinbote dubbed him) with regard to Shade's murderer:

Line 998: Some neighbor's gardener

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about Aunt Maud's mental illness and mentions the monsters in her brain:

Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush

Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush

And torsion of paralysis assail

Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,

Famed for its sanitarium. There she'd sit

In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit

Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.

Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.

Describing the conversation at the Faculty Club, 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 Professor Pardon (American History):

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his visit to a Mrs. Z. who, like Shade, saw a tall white fountain during her heart attack. But “fountain” in Jim Coates’ article about Mrs. Z.’s heart attack turns out to be a misprint of “mountain:”

                         I also called on Coates.

He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.

He took his article from a steel file:

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (Earth's twin planet also known as Demonia), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other: