Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

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:

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Marina, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Aqua’s letters to Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’):

According to the narrator of VN’s story Istreblenie tiranov (“Tyrants Destroyed,” 1936), laughter saved him:

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 arrived in America descending by parachute: