Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the false mustache makes him look like Pierre Legrand, his fencing master:

Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) tells Demon (Van’s and Ada’s father) pozhalsta bez glupostey (“please, no silly things”):

In VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) lepet Marfin’ki (Marthe’s lisping prattle) and lepet (the prattle) of Cecilia C. (Cincinnatus’s mother) is mentioned:

The poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962), John Shade likes his name:

After line 274 there is a false start in the draft:

In a discarded variant John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he likes his name:

When Cecilia C. visits him in the fortress, Cincinnatus (the main character in VN’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) is granted a glimpse of the lining of life:

According to 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), he is known on the campus as the Great Beaver:

In VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) nicknamed his black gardener “Balthasar, Prince of Loam:”

At an informal supper on the eve of Cincinnatus’s beheading M’sieur Pierre (the executioner in VN’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) recites: Luna, balkon, ona i on (“A porch, moon’s torch, and he, and she”):

One of the three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962), John Shade was born on July 5, 1898. Two other main characters, Charles Kinbote and Jakob Gradus, were born seventeen years later, on July 5, 1915. In a letter to his brother Mikhail that he wrote on his seventeenth birthday (October 31, 1838, OS) Dostoevski twice uses the word gradus (degree):