Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In his Commentary and Index 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) mentions Aros and Grindelwood, fine towns in East Zembla:

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen mentions the clothes hangers that looked to Aqua like the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians:

In a conversation at the Faculty Club 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) tells Professor Pardon that he is confusing him with some refugee from Nova Zembla:

Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"

In a conversation at the Faculty Club John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that one of the four people whom he is said to resemble is the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria - to which Professor Pardon remarks that she looks like Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord who is on sabbatical in England), especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner:

On the night before his pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) dreams of Bouteillan (the French butler at Ardis) who explains to Van that the ‘dor’ in the name of an adored river (Ladore) equals the corruption of hydro in ‘dorophone:’

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen quotes somebody's words that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occur in trilingual families:

Describing the King's escape from Zembla, 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 Silfhar Falls:

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), the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers:"

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) speaks of misprints and mentions the artistic correlation between the English crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series:

The characters in Quercus, a novel that Cincinnatus, the hero of VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935), reads in the fortress, include three merry wayfarers, Tit, Pud, and the Wandering Jew: