Vladimir Nabokov

Annotations by Alexey Sklyarenko

Description

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

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 24 February, 2025

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 24 February, 2025

Describing his dinner in ‘Ursus’ with Ada and Lucette, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 23 February, 2025

In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Ada, after joining Van on the divan beside the picture window, points to a group of people: two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf who is walking à reculons as if taking pictures:

 

Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over.

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 21 February, 2025

Among the combinations in which 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) finds the name of Shade's murderer is "a prig rad us:"

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 20 February, 2025

In his commentary 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) cites several combinations that contain the name of Shade's murderer:

 

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 19 February, 2025

In his Commentary 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) quotes the first two lines of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) in Zemblan translation:

 

Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 19 February, 2025

In a discarded variant quoted by 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) in his commentary to Shade's poem Shade mentions great temples and Tanagra dust: