Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his life in Paris in the 1930s, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) quotes a poem in which zvezdoobraznost' nebesnyh zvyozd (the stellate shape of heavenly stars) is mentioned:

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 Hodinski, Queen Yaruga’s lover and goliart (court jester) who is said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste:

Describing the murder of Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions old, gray, mad Nijinski:

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), his very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when he was three:

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955, 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:

Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) tells Van that, when he was Van’s age, his father allowed him Lilletovka and that Illinois Brat:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) paraphrases the lines in Lermontov’s poem The Demon (1829-40), replacing “the summits of the Caucasus” with “the summits of the Tacit” and “Kazbek” with “Mount Peck:”

When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) walks some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flies to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character), Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) and Dorothy Vinelander (Ada’s sister-in-law) are Chose students:

In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he [Van Veen] went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)

According to Ada, her husband called Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father, the son of Dedalus Veen) Dementiy Labirintovich:

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’