Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his daughter’s tragic death and mentions the preview of Remorse:

"Was that the phone?" You listened at the door.

More headlights in the fog. There was no sense

In window-rubbing: only some white fence

And the reflector poles passed by unmasked.

"Are we quite sure she's acting right?" you asked.

Describing Gradus' looks, 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 the bleak oblong of Gradus' face and his somewhat mesmeric organs of vision:

In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about his dead daughter (whose name he never mentions) and says:

I think she always nursed a small mad hope. (Line 383)

In his story The Dance of Death (1927) Algernon Blackwood (an English writer, 1869-1951) mentions an impossible hope wakened by Nature:

Describing Shade's last birthday (July 5, 1959), 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 old Dr. Sutton (one of the guests at Shade's birthday party) "a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman:"

The three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd) “Vinogradus” and “Leningradus” and repeats the word “squeeze” three times:

The three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). According to Kinbote, killing John Shade was Gradus' "crowning blunder:" 

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), Shade's former lawyer called the contract signed by Sybil Shade (the poet's widow) "a fantastic farrago of evil:"

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) says that he may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art:

The wife of Charles the Beloved (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, the last self-exiled King of Zembla), Queen Disa is Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone:

Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her album and favorite trees, 49; married 1949, 80; her letters on ethereal paper with a watermark I cannot make out, her image torturing me in my sleep, 433. (Index)

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), on the eve of his wedding King Charles prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral: