Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his novel Letters from Terra (1892), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Flora, Professor Leyman’s assistant:

According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), he can enumerate only a few trees in the so-called Shakespeare Avenue at the campus of Wordsmith University:

At the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions some neighbor's gardener:

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly -

Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 996-999)

Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled:

England where poets flew the highest, now

Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;

Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,

The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop

And all the Social Novels of our age

Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page. (note to Line 922)

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), Shade’s heart attack almost coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America:

In VN's story The Vane Sisters (1951) the spirits of Oscar Wilde and Leo Tolstoy appear at a sèance arranged by Cynthia:

Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, 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) says that he cannot write out the odd dark word employed by his black gardener with respect to the murderer:

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 the servants at Ardis are not Mercuries:

Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, 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) says that he cannot write out the odd dark word employed by his black gardener with respect to the killer:

Describing the King’s escape from the palace, 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 game of lansquenet played by two soldiers on a stone bench in the palace court: