Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

During her visit to Kingston (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's American University) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who brings Van a letter from Ada) tells Van that she can swear by William Shakespeare that she is a virgin:

‘Van, it will make you smile’ [thus in the MS. Ed.].

‘Van,’ said Lucette, ‘it will make you smile’ (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled), ‘but if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.’

In his pocket diary Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) describes the first days of his stay at the Haze house in Ramsdale and calls Lolita "the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up:"

At the end of May, 1947, thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her, because on the eve McCoo's house was destroyed by fire:

In his pocket diary Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) describes the first days of his stay at the Haze house in Ramsdale and mentions the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood:

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 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) calls himself "the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils with the fate of the innocent author:"

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:

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:

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:

Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Richard Leonard Churchill's novel about a certain Crimean Khan in the course of which the author twice mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout):

In VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian's half-brother V. (the narrator and main character) describes his meeting with Sebastian and his girlfriend in Paris on a dull grey afternoon in November or December 1924: