Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved who report that no ghosts walk:

Humbert's chess partner at Beardsley, Gaston Godin (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) is a namesake of Gaston Leroux (1868-1927), a French writer of detective novels, the author of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ("The Phantom of the Opera," 1909). Among the people with whose photographs Gaston Godin had decorated the sloping wall of his studio is Tchaikovski, a Russian composer (1840-93):

At Beardsley Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) plays chess with Gaston Godin (a professor of French):

In "Wanted," a poem composed by Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him, there is a French stanza:

L’autre soir un air froid d’opéra m’alita:  

Son félé - bien fol est qui s’y fie! 

Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita! 

Lolita, qu’ai-je fait de ta vie? (2.25)

As a young man in Paris, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) composed parodies of Eliot:

The characters in VN’s novel Lolita (1955) include the Reverend Rigger, a teacher at Beardsley School whom the girls call Rev. Rigor Mortis (“stiffness of death”):

In March 1905 Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father, Van mentions The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin (an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith) by Kithar K. L. Sween (a friend of Milton Eliot, the real estate magnate):

The wife of John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962), Sybil Shade is a namesake of Humbert Humbert's Aunt Sybil (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955):

Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the words of the author of Dark Age "wine, wine, wine, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time:"

During Van's conversation with Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) Demon says that he he is not concerned with semantics — or semination and Van asks Demon not to use philistine epithets:

The most protracted of the several pauses having run its dark course, Demon’s voice emerged to say, with a vigor that it had lacked before: