Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale FireAda and other Nabokov works here.

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 20 November, 2025

Describing his stay at Silver Spur Court in Elphinstone (a little town in the Rockies where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions big Frank (Mrs. Hays's beau, a robust and kindly trucker) and a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled left hand:

 

I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 20 November, 2025

In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Mr. "Windmuller," the "Ramsdale" lawyer who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 18 November, 2025

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:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 17 November, 2025

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.

By Alexey Sklyarenko , 16 November, 2025

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.