Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his house and mentions the stiff vane so often visited by the naïve, the gauzy mockingbird:

The house itself is much the same. One wing

We've had revamped. There's a solarium. There's

A picture window flanked with fancy chairs.

TV's huge paperclip now shines instead

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), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:

After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ with their half-sister Lucette Van and Ada make love in Van’s Manhattan flat and Ada complains that Van hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk:’

Describing Kim Beauharnais’s album, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the painted word that would be retouched by the still richer brush of time:

When Ada recites her revised monologue of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Greg Erminin exclaims ‘Oh, that’s good:’

‘Et pourtant,’ said the sound-sensitive governess, wincing, ‘I read to her twice Ségur’s adaptation in fable form of Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer.’

‘She also knows my revised monologue of his mad king,’ said Ada:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) the element that destroys Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air:

Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)

According to Miss Cleft (the headmistress of Ada’s school for girls), a thorn is always close to a bud:

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark:

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Lucette’s note (written after the dinner in ‘Ursus’ and debauch à trois in Van’s Manhattan flat) to Van and Ada ends in the words Pour Elle (Fr. “for her”):

Describing his father’s death in a mysterious airplane disaster, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers: