Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The characters in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) include the philosopher Adam Krug and his friend Ember, the Shakespeare scholar and translator. Ember (the name means in Hungarian "human being") is the son of a Persian merchant:

But enough of this, let us hear Ember's rendering of some famous lines:

Ubit' il' ne ubit'? Vot est' oprosen.

Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren

Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka –

The characters in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) include the philosopher Adam Krug and his friend Ember, the Shakespeare scholar and translator. Krug means in Russian "circle;" ember means in Hungarian "human being." This makes one think of the Vitruvian Man (It., L'uomo vitruviano), a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (dated to c. 1490):

The characters in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) include Krug's friend Ember, the Shakespeare scholar and translator. Hamlet's famous soliloquy in Ember's version begins: Ubit' il' ne ubit'?  (To kill or not to kill?), a play on Byt' ili ne byt' (To be or not to be), the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy in a standard Russian translation: 

But enough of this, let us hear Ember's rendering of some famous lines:

Ubit' il' ne ubit'? Vot est' oprosen.

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (Earth's twin planet also known as Demonia), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Estoty (the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper):

In his commentary to Shade’s poem 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) calls Gradus (Shade’s murderer) “half-man who is half mad:"

Describing Gradus’ activities in Paris, 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 Oswin Bretwit, the former Zemblan consul in Paris:

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), even a peasant's room in his native land presents a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of deadly drafts:

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, resembles a Medusa-locked hag:

During one of their ten meetings in Mont Roux in October 1905 Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) tells Van (Van Veen, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) that a couple of hours after Demon's death in a mysterious airplane disaster she and her husband had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards:

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), Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:

Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray