He entered the Gothic archway of the hall where Bouteillan, the old bald butler who unprofessionally now wore a mustache (dyed a rich gravy brown), met him with gested delight - he had once been the valet of Van's father - 'Je parie,' he said, 'que Monsieur ne me reconnaît pas,' and proceeded to remind Van of what Van had already recollected unaided, the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past) which Bouteillan had helped him to fly one day in a meadow dotted with buttercups. Both looked up: the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky. (1.5)

I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald - a Russian version of Walter Pater - later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. (Speak, Memory, Chapter Fourteen, 2)

В конце девяностых годов девятнадцатого столетия братья Райт, американцы, заявили о своём первенстве в свободном полёте на аппарате тяжелее воздуха, продержавшись над землёй в течение пятидесяти девяти секунд.

Kuprin (who lived in Gatchina) is the author of Lyudi-ptitsy ("Men-Birds," 1917), Poteryannoe serdtse ("The Lost Heart," 1931), a story about Russian aviation pioneers, and a memoir essay (1915) on Utochkin, the sprotsman and airman who went mad and died in a mental clinic. The name Utochkin comes from utochka (little duck) and brings to mind Colonel Gusev, a character in Pale Fire whose name comes from gus' (goose):

King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned at sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant," Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. (Kinbote's note to line 71)

Я познакомился с ним в Одессе, на Большом Фонтане, летом 1904 года, и с тех пор никогда не мог себе вообразить Уточкина без Одессы и Одессу без Уточкина. И в самом деле, покойный Сергей Исаевич был в этом городе так же известен всем от мала до велика, как знаменитый покойный адмирал Зеленой или как бронзовое изваяние дюка Ришелье на Николаевском бульваре.

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she [Fleur de Fyler] knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."

/ / / /
On sagaren werem tremkin tri stana
/ / / /
Verbala wod gev ut tri phantana

(I have marked the stress accents.) (Kinbote's note to line 80)

During his heart attack Shade saw a tall white fountain (PF, Canto Three, l. 707). At the beginning and end of his poem Shade compares himself to the shadow of the waxwing. Shade's parents were ornithologists. In his Commentary Kinbote calls Shade's wife (born Irondell) Sybil Lastochkin (in Russian lastochka means what hirondelle does in French, "swallow"). Sirin (VN's Russian nom de plume) is also a man-bird (or, rather, "woman-bird").

Kinbote's Zembla has a lot in common with Ultima Thule of VN's unfinished novel Solus Rex. Ultima Thule is a poem by Bryusov (included in "Seven Colors of Rainbow"). In his memoir essay on Bryusov (included in "Necropolis," 1939) Hodasevich speaks of Bryusov's hope to direct Russian literature under the Bolsheviks and uses the word gradusy (degrees):

А какая надежда на то, что в истории литературы будет сказано: "В таком-то году повернул русскую литературу на столько-то градусов".

Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (a Jack of small trades and a killer) "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus." Like Marina Tsvetaev, Kuprin returned to Russia and in 1938 died in Leningrad.

In his essay on Bryusov Hodasevich makes a footnote quoting Ayhenvald's letter of August 5, 1926, in which the critic accuses the late Bryusov of his expulsion from Russia:

Покойный критик Ю. И. Айхенвальд, высланный из России в 1922 г., писал мне впоследствии: «О Брюсове… И сам я меньше всего склонен его идеализировать. Он сделал мне не мало дурного и, когда сопричислился к сильным мира сего, некрасиво, т.е. экономически мстил мне за отрицательный отзыв о нём в одной из моих давнишних статей. Самая высылка моя — я это знаю наверное, из источника безукоризненного — произошла при его содействии».