Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Valentinov is Luzhin’s shakhmatnyi opekun (chess father):

In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin tells to the girl whom he met in a German spa that she will be his wife and uses the word umolyayu (I implore you):

VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) begins as follows:

In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Luzhin’s classmates call him Antosha, because the boy’s father, the author of books for children, wrote a novel Priklyucheniya Antoshi (“Tony’s Adventures”):

At a Russian charity ball in Berlin Luzhin, the main character in VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930), meets his schoolmate Petrishchev:

The characters in VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) include Valentinov, Luzhin’s tutor and manager whom Luzhin’s father, the writer, wants to use in his new book:

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

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions a story in a magazine about a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand:

It was a story in a magazine

About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been

Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.

She told her interviewer of "The Land

In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) likes to have her hair done in the open so as to forestall the zephyrs:

Describing King Victor’s last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions an ironic Hesperus that rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky: