Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include the civil engineer Kern who prided himself on having been a close acquaintance of the late Alexander Blok:

In VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) Cincinnatus asks M’sieur Pierre if rokovoy muzhik (the fateful churl) has not arrived yet:

-- Защита во всяком случае остроумная, -- сказал Цинциннат, -- но я в куклах знаю толк. Не уступлю.

 -- Напрасно, -- обиженно сказал м-сье Пьер. -- Это вы ещё по молодости лет, -- добавил он после молчания. -- Нет, нет, нельзя быть таким несправедливым...

In his reply to Bernard Pivot's question "You wrote this marvellous novel The Luzhin Defence: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of Fischer’s attitude?" VN mentions enigmatic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia:

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp:”

While snubbing gods, including the big G,

Iph borrowed some peripheral debris

From mystic visions; and it offered tips

(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -

How not to panic when you're made a ghost:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions a hereafter none can verify and a domestic ghost:

At the beginning of Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he will spy on beauty as none has spied on it yet and mentions two methods of composing, A and B:

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:

In VN's novel Podvig ("Glory," 1932) Martin’s uncle Henry tells to the local abbé that in his time young men became doctors, soldiers, notaries:

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:

The author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript, John Ray, Jr. was awarded the Poling Prize for his modest work “Do the Senses make Sense?”:

Describing a lunch at Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls the dackel Dack “the golden-brown stoat:”