Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he writes Lolita in legal captivity (a New York gaol). Describing the prison library, Humbert Humbert mentions A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie:

Describing Gradus’ day in New York, 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 agate type in which the Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry:"

At the end of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) compares our childhood memories to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:

When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) describes his nights in “Ardis the First,” Ada takes over and mentions the song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress:

At the beginning of VN's novel Pnin (1957) the narrator mentions Pnin's conservative black Oxfords (formal, lace-up dress shoes defined by "closed lacing," meaning the shoelace eyelet tabs are stitched underneath the front part of the shoe):

At the beginning of VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin senior, the writer of books for boys, would be rapping with feigned interest po steklu barometra (on the barometer dial), where the hand always stood at storm:

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions a story in a magazine about a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand:

It was a story in a magazine

About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been

Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.

She told her interviewer of "The Land

Beyond the Veil" and the account contained

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) Shade describes a winter evening and mentions the gradual and dual blue: 

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake

Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,

A dull dark white against the day's pale white

And abstract larches in the neutral light.

And then the gradual and dual blue

As night unites the viewer and the view,

And in the morning, diamonds of frost

Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed

The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert proposes “nymphets” as a word for sexually attractive little girls:

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” (1.5)