Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

After murdering Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) wonders if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure:

In his Index 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) mentions a well-known and very courageous master builder and his three young apprentices: Yan, Yonny, and Angeling:

In his Foreword 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) describes Shade destroying his drafts and mentions the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé:

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 the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the king’s uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:

Describing a 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) calls one of the interlocutors “Pink” and mentions Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957):

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), he writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. In his Commentary Kinbote calls Cedarn “a ghost town:”

Lines 609-614: Nor can one help, etc.

This passage is different in the draft:

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), he writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in a desolate log cabin:

These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading

39 ........... and home would haste my thieves

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) mentions the star that no party member can ever reach:

Describing Cincinnatus’s childhood, VN mentions tych’ (poke), a game that Cincinnatus, the hero of VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935), played with other children:

In one of his epigrams on Pasternak VN mentions a naked pastor (pastor nag):

Когда упал бы пастор на ком

и был бы этот пастор наг,

тогда сказали б: Пастернаком

является абсурдный знак.

If a pastor had fallen down on a lump

and if this pastor were naked,

then they would say: "Pasternak