102: “…a dream would come, introducing to a latent inamorata at morning twilight in a somewhat infantile setting, marked by exquisite aching stirrings that I knew as a boy, as a youth, as a madman, as an old dying voluptuary.”: As Vadim describes the onset of his love for Miss Blagovo, I cannot help but be reminded of the temporally expansive reflection on youth and budding sexuality of Van Veen in Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

102: “The sense of recurrence… in a great house belonging to strangers or distant cousins.”: Again, this reflection on a childhood spent among the lavishly bucolic is reminiscent of Ada, or Ardor, or, possibly more accurately, of Nabokov’s own childhood.

102: “midsummer name day“: Interestingly, “Anna” is the Russian name day of July 18th, and Vadim affectionately calls Annette Blagovo “Anna.”

102: “In one of the beds I find myself just awoken from some secondary dream of only formulary importance”: Here, it appears Vadim intends “secondary dream” to mean a “dream within a dream” of sorts; however, the term “secondary dream” bears a striking, contextual resemblance to the Freudian concept of “secondary revision.” This psychological concept appears particularly relevant in Look at the Harlequins, with its themes of fragile memory, retrospective reconstruction, and dementia.

103: “My next thought–and it intensifies the throbbings–concerns the strangeness of boy and girl being assigned to sleep in the same makeshift room: … might have been deemed wide enough for perfect decorum in the case of children.”: Once more, visions of Ada, or Ardor persist in Vadim’s (Vladimir’s?) recollection of his dream–childhood passion, chance collisions with the opposite sex, etc.

103: “Before revealing to her what she called…”serious intentions”–and before even solving the riddle of why I really loved her–I decided to tell her of my incurable illness.”: This appears to refer to Vadim’s belief–true or otherwise–that he is beginning to experience the onset of symptoms of dementia.