Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing a party in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Doc Ecksreher (a play on X-rays):

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Ada’s last letter to Van (in which she tells him that she will marry another man, if he spurns her) ends in the words Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine):

On the eve of his duel with Tapper Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) remembers the morning of the day on which he left Ardis forever and mentally calls Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis) “a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids:”

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), the maiden name of Shade’s mother was Caroline Lukin:

In the Kalugano hospital, where he recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentally calls Ardis Hall (the estate of his uncle Daniel Veen) “le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall:”

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), his and Ada’s half-sister Lucette turned out to be the impeccable paranymph:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Violet Knox (old Van’s typist) is an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump:

Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when they make love for the first time), Ada compares herself and Van to Praying Children:

Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —

Describing the Chateaubriand mosquito, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a kind of recueilli silence in which it settled on pretty bare arms and legs:

Describing Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a village in Normandy called, dreadfully, Deuil: