Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Revisiting Ramsdale in 1952, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) meets Mrs. Chatfield (whose daughter Phyllis was Lolita’s classmate in the Ramsdale school):

According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita’s married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) mentions deified Harold Haze (Lolita’s father):

Describing the suicide of his and Ada’s half-sister Lucette, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that death is only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude:

At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) calls her husband Daniel Veen bednyachok (poor, poor little man) and remarks that Ada’s cruelty is sometimes satanic:

Describing his affair with Dolly von Borg, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions “Casanovia of all places:”

As she speaks to Van, Ada mentions a delicious spazmochka experienced by Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister):

Van walked over to a monastic lectern that he had acquired for writing in the vertical position of vertebrate thought and wrote what follows:

Poor L.

According to Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father), the sweetest word in the language rhymes with "billiard:"

In Cano One of his poem Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions the Canadian maid and her niece Adèle who had seen the Pope:

A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.
Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,
I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed
For everybody to be always well,
Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adèle,
Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God. (79-85)

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), his landlord, Judge Goldsworth, is an authority on Roman law (note to Lines 47-48). In Chekhov’s story Ionych (1898) Ivan Petrovich Turkin (a jovial punster) mentions rimskoe pravo (Roman law) and his wife Vera Iosifovna tells Dr. Startsev that her husband is an Othello: