142: “We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in the complicated vicinity of Casanovia.”: Cazenovia, NY is an affluent town in the center of the state, and is home to Cazenovia College.

142: “I could not help noticing Dolly welcomed all the restless wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordid little affair.”: Here, “Dolly” seems reminiscent of “Dolores,” Lolita’s birth name in Nabokov’s eponymous novel.

143: “…research I was supposed to be conducting in the Public Library.”

143: “…and traveled in a crowded Pullman from one nightmare to another.”

143: “A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was to stop at a couple of decades later)…”: Here, “mnemonic reverse” seems to suggest an association of ideas that paradoxically “remind” the speaker of an image which he has not yet seen. This “paradox” is possible through the structure of Look at the Harlequins as a largely-present tense work of simultaneous projection and retrospection.

143: “Dumbert Dumbert, Dumberton…”: A shameless, self (his work)-referential Nabokovian play on words–Humbert Humbert of Lolita.

143: “If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgic delirium…”

143: “We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern living room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rocker supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child.”

144: “…that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the Red Topper) impotent…”: This appears to be a reference to the fictitious Krasnyy Tsilindr, or The Red Top Hat, and some character within it. In Nabokov’s own Invitation to a Beheading we have Pierre who wears red.

145: “Honolulu Cooler”

145: “eoan” : defined as “of or relating to the dawn or the east.”

145: “Dolly, retransformed by the alchemy of her blazing anger–and now untellable from the little girl who had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser…”

145: “…virtually tore my necktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape but preferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters…”: Again, the suggestion that Vadim is a milder Humbert Humbert.

146: “Far, far away, nurse Dolan or Nolan (at that distance such nice distinctions no longer mattered)…”: In the context of retrospection and dementia, this statement assumes greater significance–details become blurred, and the importance of factual specificity declines in tenuous recollection.