75: Boyan: Rival publishing firm to Vadim Vadimiorich N.’s and Morozov’s publishing firm “the Bronze Horseman.”
75: Continental notation: “Where the letter fences the file and the number the rank of a chess square.” See more.
76: Trinity College: Reference to Trinity College, Cambridge, where the author studied.
76: Magazin: French: “store.”
76: Blitz game: A type of chess game in which each side is given less time to make their moves than under the normal tournament time controls of 60 to 180 minutes per player.
76: Kabinet: Russian: “study.”
77: Prokhlada:Russian: “coolness.”
77: Sderzhannost: Russian: “restraint.”
77: lifer: One who is serving life in prison.
77: Camera Obscura: Oks misstates the name of Vadim’s novel, referring instead to the name of the prototype of the modern camera. It is, however, the title of Nabokov’s novel that is being parodied. Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931 – cf. ( 1933) Kamera Obskura (Камера Обскура); English translations: Camera Obscura(1936),Laughter in the Dark (1938)
78: Geroy nashey ery: Russian: “hero of our era.” An allusion to Lermontov’s novel, Hero of Our Time.
78: All of Princess Mary is your, I mean Mary—damn it, I mean Tamara: Vadim’s Tamara is a double/satire of Nabokov’s Mary, both Vadim and Nabokov’s first novel. There is a chapter in Lermontov’s novel, entitled “Princess Mary.”
79: Bon: French: “good.”
79: confrères: French: “colleague.”
79: as Onegin describes himself to Tatiana: Reference to Eugene Onegin, the main character of Alexander Pushkin’s poem Onegin, describes himself as ‘arrogant and unsocial’ to Tatyana Larina, a shy and quiet, but passionate landowner’s daughter also featured in the poem.
79: but we can’t all be Lenski’s can we?: Reference to Vladimir Lenski, another character in Onegin, who is mortally wounded in a duel with Onegin.
79: First Duma: Reference to the election for the First State Duma, a legislative session which only ran from 27 April to 21 July 1906 in Russian and returned a significant bloc of moderate socialists and two liberal parties which demanded further reforms.
79: the Revolution: Reference to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
79: Kerenski: Reference to Alexander Kerenski, a Russian lawyer and politician, who served as the second Minister-Chairman of the Russian Provisional Government in July–November 1917.
79: sangfroid: French: “composure or coolness, sometimes excessive, as shown in danger or under trying circumstances.”
79: opyat’ oskandalisya: Russian: “I seem to have goofed again.”
79: Gogol’s Town Mayor: Reference to Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, the plot of which focuses on the activities of a corrupt town mayor.
79: the ‘experimental hospital’ of a Nazi concentration camp: Reference to Joseph Mengele’s experimental hospital at Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed unscientific, painful and often deadly human experiments on prisoners.
