Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's poem Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of the things he loathes and mentions Freud:

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;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that conchologists among the kings can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand:

At the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he is reasonably sure that he will wake at six tomorrow, on July twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, and mentions his alarm clock:

I'm reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive,

As I am reasonably sure that I

Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July

The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,

And that the day will probably be fine;

So this alarm clock let me set myself,

At The Enchanted Hunters (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a person in the clerical black asks Humbert Humbert how he had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk:

At The Enchanted Hunters (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a hostess mistakes Humbert Humbert for Mr. Braddock:

The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), a lady writer, Clare Quilty's coauthor. From John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript) we know that she has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published shortly:

In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together in The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel in Briceland:

Describing his life with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that he dwelled deep in his elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise:

For the dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) wants a bottle of Château Latour d’Estoc:

‘Good! Ah, the portentous footfall is approaching, I hear. Prascovie de Prey has the worst fault of a snob: overstatement. Bonsoir, Bouteillan. You look as ruddy as your native vine — but we are not getting any younger, as the amerlocks say, and that pretty messenger of mine must have been waylaid by some younger and more fortunate suitor.’

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), after Shade's death he distributed the ninety-two index cards with the manuscript of Shade's poem about his person and sewed up all four pockets: