Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. Describing Victor Vitry's film Letters from Terra, Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners and got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position:

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which VN's novel Ada, 1969, is set) Russia is a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, while the territory of the Soviet Russia, from Kurland to the Kuriles, is occupied by Tartary (the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate ruled by Khan Sosso):

In his essay The Texture of Time (1924) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) refuses to grant the future the status of Time:

Here a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman’s driving license, how did the ‘Prof’ reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since ‘it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.’ 

In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert is tempted to drown his wife Charlotte in Hourglass Lake:

When Lucette (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's half-sister) visits Van at Kingston (Van's American University) bringing him a letter from Ada, Van tells her that Cordula de Prey (Van's former mistress) is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak:

On Admiral Tobakoff Lucette (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's half-sister) calls one of the passengers, a tall mulatto girl, “Miss Condor” (a play on con d’or):

Describing a stage performance in which Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) played the heroine, Van Veen mentions an old nurse in Eskimo's boots:

The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Antiterra:

Describing his life in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions Vasiliy Sokolovski, the writer who since the dawn of the century had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and social history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three in the sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole village, replete with folklore and myth:

One of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) nicknamed his black gardener “Balthasar, Prince of Loam:”