Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra, Van Veen mentions the L disaster whose details are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen:

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) mentions Aqua's talc powder (now used by Marina) in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs:

At Chose (Van’s English University) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) plays poker with Dick C. (a cardsharp) and the French twins. Van wins and accepts Dick's offer to substitute for his debt an introduction to the Venus Villa Club (Eric Veen's floramors). Five or six years later, when Van meets Dick in Monte Carlo, Dick repeats the phrase “Mark ‘em!” three times and mentions a flea:

When Lucette (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's half-sister) visits Van at Kingston (Van's American University) bringing him a letter from Ada, Van notices a long, blue, violet-sealed envelope protruding from the bag and muses that chows, too, have blue tongues:

She unclicked her black-silk handbag, fished out a handkerchief and, leaving the gaping bag on the edge of the sideboard, went to the farthest window and stood there, her fragile shoulders shaking unbearably.

During Humbert's second road trip with Lolita across the USA a very old barber in Kasbeam gives Humbert a very mediocre haircut. Kasbeam brings to mind Mount Kazbek famously mentioned by Lermontov in his poem The Demon (1829-40) and Kazbich, a character in Bela, the first novella in Lermontov's Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time," 1840). The epigraph to Lermontov's poem Ne ver' sebe ("Don't Trust Yourself," 1839) is from A. Barbier's poem Iambs (1831):

Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Kasbeam, a city where a very old barber gave him a very mediocre haircut: 

During Humbert's and Lolita's second road trip across the USA, Lolita (the title character of a novel, 1955, by VN) is hospitalized in Elphinstone and abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty (the playwright who tells the hospital staff that he is Humbert's brother):

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's poem Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of the things he loathes and mentions Freud:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that conchologists among the kings can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand:

At the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he is reasonably sure that he will wake at six tomorrow, on July twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, and mentions his alarm clock:

I'm reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive,

As I am reasonably sure that I

Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July

The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,

And that the day will probably be fine;

So this alarm clock let me set myself,