from Alexey Sklyarenko:
I've read very little criticism (perhaps, none
at all) on Pale Fire; anyway, I'm certainly not the first one
to notice this. Hazel, the name of a character in PF, was the
name of a beverage (хэйзель, sounds very exotic and almost magical to
a Russian ear) in PF's Russian predecessor, Solus Rex (1942):
"Exhausted by lengthy tension, harrowed by having
been forced to wallow in another's filth, and involuntarily staggered by
the prosecutor's blast, the luckless scholar [Dr. Onze] lost his nerve and,
after a few incoherent mumblings, suddenly started, in a new, hysterically clear
voice, to tell how one night in his youth, having drunk his first glass of hazel
brandy, he accepted to go with a classmate to a brothel, and how he didn't get
there only because he fainted in the street".
This of course reminds one of Chekhov's story
"Припадок" (The Fit, 1888) written to honor the memory
of Vsevolod Garshin, the writer who comitted a suicide by falling from a
staircase landing (I have mentioned this tragic incident in connection with
ADA).
The queer name Onze sounds to a Russian ear rather
like the phrase он же ("alias") pronounced with a Jewish
accent.