Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Near the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)

In Canto Three of his poem Shade calls 1958 "a year of Tempests:"

In her note "Judge Goldsworth: Arcady's Arcane Landlord" in The Nabokovian (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35564) Mary Ross links Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote's landlord in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), to Saturn. In a canceled variant of Four: XLIII: 1-4 of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions lysoe Saturna temya (the bald pate of Saturn):

В глуши что делать в это время

Гулять? — Но голы все места

Как лысое Сатурна темя

Иль крепостная нищета.

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions “a sustained low hum of harmony:”

Gently the day has passed in a sustained

Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained

And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

To use but did not, dry on the cement.

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon

A feeling of fantastically planned,

Describing his ten secret trysts with Ada in Mont Roux, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) “Desdemonia:”

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) marries a Mr Brod or Bred who subsequently directs archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’):

When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) leaves Ardis forever, Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in “Ardis the Second”) tells him that even through kozhanyi fartuk (a leathern apron) he would not think of touching Blanche (a French maid at Ardis):

‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita 1955), his father was “a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins” (1.1).

Describing his plans to drown his wife Charlotte (Lolita’s mother) in Hourglass Lake, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the point of his perfect-crime parable:

Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable.

In The Enchanted Hunters (in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Lolita confesses that in the previous summer she had a lesbian relationship with Elizabeth Talbot: