Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his daughter and mentions Lafontaine:

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Anonymous.

At the beginning of VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert calls Lolita “light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul:”

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. (1.1)

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 line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:

I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...

The epigraph to VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) is from Smirnovski’s Uchebnik russkoy grammatiki (A Textbook of Russian Grammar):

Дуб - дерево. Роза - цветок. Олень - животное. Воробей - птица. Россия - наше Отечество. Смерть неизбежна.

П. Смирновский. Учебник русской грамматики.

The three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus. In Book III (1588) of his Essais Montaigne says that every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity:

The epigraph to VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) is from Discours sur les ombres by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande:

Comme un fou se croit Dieu

nous nous croyons mortels.

Delalande. Discours sur les ombres

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov’s mind is preoccupied with unsolvable problems: How and where do chimney sweeps wash after work:

In VN’s story Sovershenstvo (“Perfection,” 1932) Ivanov (David’s tutor) tries to convince himself that his pupil is perfect:

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), among the pseudonyms that he has toyed with before hitting on a particularly apt one was "Mesmer Mesmer:"

According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Gradus contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd: