Clystère de Tchékhov mentioned in LATH (5.1) is a play on violon d'Ingres. Dr Chekhov is the author of Skripka Rotshil'da ("Rothschild's Fiddle", 1894). The story's main character, Yakov Ivanov, nicknamed Bronze, is a coffin-maker in a small town.

Skripka (violin) is magically animated by Annenski in his poem Smychyok i struny ("The Bow and the Strings"):

И скрипка отвечала да,
Но сердцу скрипки было больно.

A part of Trilistnik soblazna (The Trefoil of Temptation), "The Bow and the Strings" was included in Annenski's Kiparisovyi larets ("The Cypress Casket", 1910) that appeared after the author's death (the poet died in December 1909, of a heart attack). The book's title is an euphemism of grob ("coffin").

In his article on Annenski (Ob Annenskom, 1935), written for the 25th anniversary of the poet's death, Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Golovin, the hero of Tolstoy's story The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Vadim's extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow ("the LATH lady") was born Tolstoy:

An extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.

"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes,images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!" (1.2)

The blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound Vadim catches the two "diplomats," Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence is an harlequin, too!

Annenski's poem "The Bow and the Strings" begins: Kakoy tyazhyolyi, tyomnyi bred... (What a heavy and dark delirium...)

Btw., Annenski's first collection of poems Tikhie pesni ("Quiet Songs", 1904) was published under the pseudonym Nik. T-o. Annenski was Gumilyov's teacher at the Hymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. Like Blok, Gumilyov (the poet who was executed in August 1921, two weeks and a half after Blok's death) is mentioned in LATH. Gumilyov and Blok is a memoir essay by Hodasevich included in Necropolis (1939).