Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

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

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 12 November, 2025

At Silver Spur Court in Elphinstone (a little town in the Rockies where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized) big Frank greets Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) with the word "Howdy:"

 

I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.

It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 12 November, 2025

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1962, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 10 November, 2025

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1962, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 9 November, 2025

Describing his attempt to find his photograph (the portrait of the artist as a younger brute) in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the words of the author of Dark Age "wine, wine, wine, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time:"

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 8 November, 2025

Describing the first occasion on which Ada had glimpsed him, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a motor landaulet that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and Ada hired to Radugalet:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 7 November, 2025

In a little poem he composed for Rita (a girl whom he picked up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a drakishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Diana (the ancient Roman goddess of hunting):