Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he spent the period from September 1951 to June 1952 in Cantrip College, four hundred miles away from New York:

Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's American University), Van Veen mentions the malheureux Pompier’s cheap novel La Condition Humaine:

Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir: 

In his Foreword and 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) mentions a distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag:

Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the three scientists one of whom had been kidnapped by a laundryman and transported to Tartary (on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set, Tartary occupies the territory of the Soviet Russia):

Ada’s letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van’s Letters from Terra, ‘a philosophical novel,’ showed no sign of life whatsoever.

Describing the King’s escape from Zembla (and then again at the end of his Commentary), 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 a red-capped Steinmann:

At the beginning of VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert mentions the sun of his infancy and golden midges:

In his essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (1956) appended to the first American edition of his novel VN mentions aesthetic bliss (afforded by a genuine work of art) and defines it as a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, ten­derness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm:

At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls the snow-covered outdoor grounds "that crystal land:"

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

At the beginning of his Foreword 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) points out the fact that Shade's poem is written in heroic couplets: