Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) in Kingston (Van's American University), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares a philosopher’s orbitless eye to a peeled hard-boiled egg and mentions Germanic grace with which the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through:

At a party thrown by Pnin (the title character of a novel, 1957, by VN) there are real German pumpernickel (dark, dense German bread made from coarsely ground wholemeal rye) and a dish of very special vinaigrette:

Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions kurortish Wace:

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.

Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above them:

We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.

Describing his tussle with Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the first years of 2000 A. D. when his book is being read in its published form and the obligatory scene in the Westerns of his elderly readers' childhood:

The name of the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), and the narrator's double pseudonym bring to mind Rayon de Rayonne, a cycle of ten poems by Georgiy Ivanov (1894-1858).

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed:

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls his collection Hebe's Cup "my final float in that damp carnival:"

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote

Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float

In that damp carnival, for now I term

Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.

Describing his quarrel with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to Mr. Hyde (a character in R. L. Stevenson's novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886):

Describing his first road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the condition of his glands and ganglia: