Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert describes Charlotte Haze (Lolita's mother) as "a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich:"

Describing the last moments of Shade's life, 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) mentions fireflies and a bat:

Line 991: horseshoes

The element that destroys Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air:

Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)

When she visits Van at Kingston (Van's American University) bringing him a letter from Ada, Lucette (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's half-sister) mentions Van's caked algarroba:

Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was’ We-have-so-much-to say’; the other was ‘We have absolutely nothing to say.’ But that sort of thing can change in one instant.

‘Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty,’ murmured Van, consulting a calendar he did not see.

At the beginning of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Rabelais’ great Maybe, “the grand potato:”

Describing his lovemakings with Ada in "Ardis the First," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions voluptuous and tender stuff that Italian masters allowed themselves to produce in between too many pious Resurrections during a too long and lusty Renaissance:

On Demonia (Earth's twin planet on which VN's novel Ada, 1969, is set) Paris is also known as Lute:

In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Lute: from ‘Lutèce’, ancient name of Paris.

In her letter to Van (written a month before Demon's death in an airplane disaster) Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) says that her sister-in-law, Dorothy Vinelander, finished Chose where she read History:

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:

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth's twin planet), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the details of the L disaster that happened on Demonia in the beau milieu of the 19th century: