In a letter of March 29, 1833, to Pushkin Pogodin asks the poet what is the name of his Ada and what he has written last year:

Поздравляю с праздником, а как зовут вашу Аду, и что вы написали в прошедшем году?

Ada was the name of Lord Byron's daughter. It seems that Pogodin asks Pushkin what is name of his daughter. The name of Pushkin's elder daughter who was born on May 19, 1832, was Maria. In 1860 Maria Aleksandrovna married General Leonid Gartung (Hartung). Next year at a ball in Tula Maria Hartung met Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and The Sevastopol Stories. The character of Anna Karenin was likely based on Maria Hartung. At the beginning of VN's Ada the opening sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1877) is turned inside out:

'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)

Pushkin's "Ada," Maria Hartung died in Moscow in 1919, the year when VN and his family left Russia forever. The last Russian city VN saw was Sevastopol.

A line in Pushkin's poem Poserpina (1824), Ada gordaya tsaritsa (the proud queen of Hell), can be read as "proud queen Ada." According to Delvig, Pushkin's Proserpina (1824) is pure music: a bird of paradise whose singing one can listen a thousand years without noticing the passage of time:

Прозерпина не стихи, а музыка: это пенье райской птички, которое слушая, не увидешь, как пройдёт тысяча лет. Эти двери давно мне знакомы. Сквозь них, ещё в Лицее, меня [иногда] часто выталкивали из Элизея. Какая искустная щеголиха у тебя истина. Подобных цветов мороз не тронет!

"What a smart dashing lady is istina (truth) in your poems. Such flowers will be spared by the frost!" (a letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to Pushkin)

In the same letter Delvig mentions Pushkin's poem Demon (1823) and addresses Pushkin vashe Parnasskoe velichestvo ("your Parnassian majesty"):

Есть ещё у меня не просьба, но только спрос: не вздумаешь ли ты дать мне стихов двадцать из Евгения Онегина? Это хорошо бы было для толпы, которая не поймёт всей красоты твоей Прозерпины или Демона, а уж про Онегина давно горло дерёт. Подумайте, ваше Парнасское величество!

In Ada Demon is the society nickname of Van's and Ada's father. 'Guillaume de Monparnasse' ("the leaving out of the 't' made it more intime," 1.31) is the penname of Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess).

In his poem O vy, kotorye lyubili... ("Oh you, who loved..." 1821) Pushkin mentions "the secret flowers of Parnassus" and arkhivy ada (the archives of Hell):

О вы, которые любили
Парнасса тайные цветы
И своевольные <мечты>
Вниманьем слабым наградили,
Спасите труд небрежный мой —
Под сенью ‎ <покрова? <?>

От рук Невежества слепого,
От взоров Зависти косой.
Картины, думы и рассказы
10 Для вас я вновь перемешал,
Смешное с важным сочетал
И бешеной любви проказы
В архивах ада отыскал...

...I have mixed for you again

the pictures, thoughts and tales,

combined the funny with the serious

and discovered the pranks of a frenzied love

in the archives of Hell...

Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) compares his and Ada's half-sister Lucette to Blok's Incognita:

He [Van] headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. (3.3)

In Blok's poem Neznakomka (Incognita, 1906) p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) cry out: in vino veritas! The poem's closing line, Ya znayu: istina v vine ("I know: in wine is truth"), can be also read as "I know: in Veen is truth."

A local entomologist, Dr Krolik (whose name means "rabbit") is Ada's teacher of natural history (1.1 et passim):

'...Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don't you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl's - an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this' (American finger-snap).

Van calls Ada "Pompeianella:"

'Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan's picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don't you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?' (1.1)

On Jan. 25, 1837, two days before his duel with d'Anthès, Pushkin spoke to Karl Bryullov, the author of "The Last Day of Pompeii" (1833), in the artist's studio:

Сегодня в нашей мастерской было много посетителей — это у нас не редкость, но, между прочим, были Пушкин и Жуковский. Сошлись они вместе, и Карл Павлович угощал их своей портфелью и альбомами. Весело было смотреть, как они любовались и восхищались его дивными акварельными рисунками, но когда он показал им недавно оконченный рисунок: «Съезд на бал к австрийскому посланнику в Смирне», то восторг их выразился криком и смехом. Да и можно ли глядеть без смеха на этот прелестный, забавный рисунок?... Пушкин не мог расстаться с этим рисунком, хохотал до слёз и просил Брюллова подарить ему это сокровище, но рисунок принадлежал уже княгине Салтыковой, и Карл Павлович, уверяя его, что не может отдать, обещал нарисовать ему другой. Пушкин был безутешен: он с рисунком в руках стал перед Брюлловым на колени и начал умолять его: «Отдай, голубчик! Ведь другого ты не нарисуешь для меня, отдай мне этот». Не отдал Брюллов рисунка, а обещал нарисовать другой. Я, глядя на эту сцену, не думал, что Брюллов откажет Пушкину. Такие люди, казалось мне, не становятся даром на колени перед равными себе. Это было ровно за четыре дня до смерти Пушкина. (A. N. Mokritski, "From the Reminiscences about A. S. Pushkin," 1855)

Pushkin's poem Vezuviy zev otkryl... ("Vesuvius opened its jaws..." 1834) was written under the impression of Bryullov's painting. In his poem Sorrentinskie fotografii (The Sorrento Photographs, 1926) Hodasevich mentions Vesuvius and the Bronze Horseman (Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter I):

В тумане Прочида лежит,
Везувий к северу дымит.
Запятнан площадною славой,
Он всё торжествен и велик
В своей хламиде тёмно-ржавой,
Сто раз прожжённой и дырявой.

И отражён кастелламарской
Зеленоватою волной,
Огромный страж России царской
Вниз опрокинут головой.
Так отражался он Невой,
Зловещий, огненный и мрачный,
Таким явился предо мной -
Ошибка пленки неудачной.

Pushkin is the author of The Bronze Horseman (1833). According to Van, at ten it took him less than twenty minutes to learn by heart Pushkin's Headless Horseman (as the poem is known on Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set):

The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive - somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin's 'Headless Horseman' poem in less than twenty minutes. (1.28)

On a picture in Marina's bedroom Van's and Ada's uncle Ivan (Marina's brother who died young and famous) is clad in a bayronka:

A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)

In the same chapter Ada's Russian diminutive turns into adova dochka (Hell's daughter):

'Oh, much worse. Old Beckstein's Tabby was a masterpiece in comparison to this - this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone, who seems to belong to a firm of Packers & Porters, because on the page which Adochka, adova dochka (Hell's daughter), happens to be relishing here, "automobile" is rendered as "wagon." And to think, to think, that little Lucette had to study Eelmann, and three terrible Toms in her Literature course at Los!' (ibid.)