At the beginning of Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he will spy on beauty as none has spied on it yet and mentions two methods of composing, A and B:

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:

In VN's novel Podvig ("Glory," 1932) Martin’s uncle Henry tells to the local abbé that in his time young men became doctors, soldiers, notaries:

In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) describes Shade destroying his drafts and mentions the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé:

The author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript, John Ray, Jr. was awarded the Poling Prize for his modest work “Do the Senses make Sense?”:

Describing a lunch at Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) calls the dackel Dack “the golden-brown stoat:”

The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include Klara Stoboy, Fyodor’s landlady:

The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include Frau Stoboy, Fyodor’s landlady:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) the action takes place on the boy’s twentieth (or, perhaps, twenty-first) birthday. In his memoir essay Muni (1926) Hodasevich says that, when he and Muni met and became friends, they were only inexperienced boys of twenty or a little older and mentions les simvolov (a forest of symbols) in which they easily got lost:

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) Herman Brink had called the system of the boy’s delusions “referential mania:"

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) one of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago: