Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

At the beginning of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions l’if, lifeless tree:

L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions a hive in which he is locked up:

What moment in the gradual decay

Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?

Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?

Are some less lucky, or do all escape?

A syllogism: other men die; but I

In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) one of the chapters ends with a pseudo-Shakespearean quote:

After murdering Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) wonders if some surgeon of genius might not revive his victim:

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions his good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. (Humbert Humbert’s lawyer):

Describing his first night with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the key in his hot hairy fist:

When Andrey Vinelander (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Ada’s husband) falls ill, his sister Dorothy reads to him old issues of Golos Feniksa (“The Phoenix Voice,” a Russian-language newspaper in Arizona):

In his Index entry on Botkin, V. 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) renders the obsolete word botelyi (fat, stout, obese, corpulent) as “big-bellied.” This epithet brings to mind tolstopuzyi (pot-bellied), a word used by Pushkin in the first line of his poem Rumyanyi kritik moy, nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (“My

In Kinbote's Index to Shade's poem there is the following entry:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls the little scissors with which he pares his fingernails “a dazzling synthesis of sun and star:”

The little scissors I am holding are

A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.