Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

The main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972), Hugh Person dies in a hotel fire. Describing Hugh Person's death, the spectral narrators in VN's novel mention the orgasm of art that courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic:

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) revisits Switzerland in 1965, he experiences a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see a hotel in which he had stayed with his father ten years ago:

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) first meets Armande, she has a book, the paperback edition of Mr. R.’s novel Figures in a Golden Window, in her lap:

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) first meets Armande, she has a book, the paperback edition of Mr. R.’s novel Figures in a Golden Window, in her lap:

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) wonders if he should stop investigating his abyss and mentions a web of sense:

Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,

And stop investigating my abyss?

But all at once it dawned on me that this

At the end of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions ornaments of accidents and possibilities and tells his wife Sybil that he can grope his way to some faint hope:

It did not matter who they were. No sound,

No furtive light came from their involute

Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,

Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns

Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, 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 an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) who sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street:

Describing his rented house, 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 Alphina, the youngest of Judge Goldsworth’s four daughters:

Describing Gradus’s stay in Nice, 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) calls Izumrudov (one of the greater Shadows who visits Gradus and tells him the King’s new name and address) “the gay green vision:”

In 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) says that, to be completed, Shade’s almost finished poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”):