The lady with the little dog was leaving before dinner. It was a history rather amusing. It appeared that her husband looked after dogs when their masters had to absent themselves. The lady, when she voyaged herself, generally took with her a small animal, choosing from among those that were most melancholic. This morning her husband telephoned that the owner had returned earlier from his trip and was reclaiming his pet with great cries. (25)

The little spitz dog is asleep on the back seat of an Amilcar driven by the kennelman's wife back to Trux. (26)

The little dog in Chekhov's story Dama s sobachkoy ("The Lady with the Little Dog," 1899) is a spitz.

A. Babikov: "The Amilcar became tragically famous all over the world after the long scarf of Isadora Duncan, seated in the back seat, got caught up in the axle of the open-topped sports model of the Amilcar... and she was immediately strangled, and her accidental death was reported in hundreds of articles, raised up as a symbol of fate’s persecution of creative personalities."

Isadora Duncan was one of Sergey Esenin's wives. A volume of Esenin's poetry (Esenin Sergey. Stikhotvoreniya, 1910-25), with G. Ivanov's introductory article, appeared in 1950 in Paris. In his article on Esenin G. Ivanov mentions Isadora Duncan's dance with a scarf, Esenin's suicide in Angleterre (a hotel in St. Petersburg) and Duncan's death on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice:

Следует вам всё-таки с ней познакомиться. Посмотреть, как она с шарфом танцует. Замечательно. Оживает у ней в руках шарф. Держит она его за хвост, а сама в пляс. И кажется, не шарф — а хулиган у неё в руках. Будто не она одна, а двое танцуют. Глазам не веришь, такая, — как это? — экспрессия получается... Хулиган её и обнимает, и треплет, и душит... А потом вдруг — раз! — и шарф у ней под ногами. Сорвала она его, растоптала — и крышка! — Нет хулигана, смятая тряпка под ногами валяется... Удивительно она это проделывает. Сердце сжимается. Видеть спокойно не могу. Точно это я у нее под ногами лежу. Точно мне это крышка.
Я тороплюсь, меня ждут. Описание танца с шарфом оставляет меня холодным. Мне представляется запыхавшаяся Дункан, тяжело прыгающая с красным флагом по сцене Большого московского театра. Волнение, с которым говорит Есенин, не передаётся мне. Волнение я испытаю потом, когда прочту, как Есенин повесился на ремне одного из тех самых чемоданов, которые сейчас лежат в его номере Адлона — самой шикарной гостиницы Берлина. И ещё потом, года два спустя, узнав, что Айседору Дункан в Ницце,— на Promenade des Anglais, задушил её собственный шарф...

The second edition of Ivanov's memoirs Peterburgskie zimy ("The St. Petersburg Winters," 1952), in which the article on Esenin is included as the book's last chapter, came out in the Chekhov Publishing House in NY. In 1952 izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova published the full text of VN's Dar (The Gift, 1937), the novel whose Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") had been rejected by the editors of Contemporary Notes. A satire on G. Ivanov and the editors of Chisla (Numbers), VN's story Usta k ustam ("Lips to Lips," 1931) first appeared in VN's collection Vesna v Fialte i drugie rasskazy (Spring in Fialta and Other Stories, 1956) published by the Chekhov Publishing House. "A lovely Crimean town" (Yalta) is mentioned at the beginning of Spring in Fialta.

Amilcar also hints at Hamilcar, Hannibal's father, a character in Flaubert’s novel Salambo (1862). Flaubert is the author of Madame Bovary (1857). In Drugie berega (the Chekhov Publishing House, 1954) and Speak, Memory (1967) VN mentions Mme Bovary's lorgnette that was lost by Chekhov's Lady with the Little Dog on the pier at Yalta:

Итак Луиза стоит на плоской кровле своего дома, опершись белой рукой на каменный парапет, ещё влажный от ночных рос, и чета её грудей (так и написано
"twin breasts") поднимается и опускается, а лорнет направлен -- этот лорнет я впоследствии нашёл у Эммы Бовари, а потом его держала Анна Каренина, от которой он перешел к Даме с собачкой и был ею потерян на ялтинском молу. (DB, Chapter Ten, 2)

That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov's Lady with the

Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta. (SM, Chapter Ten, 2)

The summer of 1913 VN's cousin and best friend, Baron Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg, spent with his mother in Switzerland:

Следующее лето он провёл в Швейцарии, с матерью – и вскоре после его смерти (в 1919-ом) она, вновь посетив тот же самый отель и получив тот же номер, который они занимали тогда, в июле, сунула руку в складку кресла в поисках выпавшей заколки для волос и извлекла на свет крохотного кирасира, спешенного, но всё сжимающего кривыми ножками бока незримого скакуна. (DB, Chapter Ten, 1)

The following summer he was away in Switzerland with his mother - and soon after his death (in 1919), upon revisiting the same hotel and getting the same rooms they had occupied that July, she thrust her hand into the recess of an armchair in quest of a fallen hairpin and brought up a tiny cuirassier, unhorsed but with bandy legs of still compressing an invisible charger. (SM, Chapter Ten, 1)

Yuri Rausch was killed fighting the Reds in northern Crimea.

I saw him dead in Yalta, the whole front of his skull pushed back by the impact of several bullets, which had hit him like the swing of a monstrous swing, when having outstipped his detachment he was in the act of recklessly attacking alone a Red machine-gun nest. (ibid.)

Yuri's German surname and title bring to mind Mr. R, the ghostly narrator in TT:

"Mister R.", as he was called in the office (he had a long German name, in two installments, with a nobiliary particle between castle and crag), wrote English considerably better than he spoke it. On contact with paper it acquired a shapeliness, a richness, an ostensible dash, that caused some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist. (8)

Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy nose with enlarged pores, shaggy bellicose eyebrows, an unerring stare, and a bulldog mouth full of bad teeth. (10)

Hugh Person's surname is corrupted "Peterson:"

As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted "Peterson" and pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up - not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot! ) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. (2)

Natalia Nabokov (a sister of VN's father) married Ivan de Peterson, Russian consul at The Hague (SM, Chapter Three, 1). Yuri Rausch was the son of Nina, VDN's sister who divorced Yuri's father, military Governor of Warsaw, to marry Admiral Nikolay Kolomeytsev, hero of the Japanese war.