Describing his life with Ada in his old age, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions his old valet, Stepan Nootkin:
According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), Dr Fitzbishop (a surgeon in the Kalugano hospital where Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper) is a poshlyak:
In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van criticizes Ada’s version of a poem by Coppée and compares Ada to a Russian nobleman who chucked his coachman to the wolves, and then fell out of his sleigh:
According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the merest touch of Ada’s finger or mouth produced not only a more potent but essentially different delicia than the slowest ‘winslow’ of the most sophisticated young harlot:
Describing his dinner in ‘Ursus’ with Ada and Lucette, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin:
According to Ada, she saw the phrase "far enough, fair enough" in small violet letters before Van (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) put it into orange ones:
The children of Demon Veen and Marina Durmanov, Van and Ada (the two main characters in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) are officially maternal cousins and can marry only by special decree:
Revisiting Ardis in 1888, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) meets Cordula de Prey (Ada’s schoolmate at Brownhill) wearing a yellow-blue Vass frock:
