Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 24 March, 2024

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), he is nature’s faithful hound:

 

I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world - nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 23 March, 2024

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved who report that no ghosts walk:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 22 March, 2024

Humbert's chess partner at Beardsley, Gaston Godin (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) is a namesake of Gaston Leroux (1868-1927), a French writer of detective novels, the author of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ("The Phantom of the Opera," 1909). Among the people with whose photographs Gaston Godin had decorated the sloping wall of his studio is Tchaikovski, a Russian composer (1840-93):