The cooing birds are golubi (doves). Stonet sizyi golubochek ("Moans the Grey-blue Little Dove") is a famous song by Dmitriev. It is one of the songs that in Pushkin's Domik v Kolomne ("The Little House in Kolomna," 1830) Parasha (who is bela, nezhna, kak golubitsa, "white, tender, as a dove") would sing to the accompaniment of guitar:

Играть умела также на гитаре
И пела: Стонет сизый голубок,
И Выду ль я, и то, что уж постаре,
Всё, что у печки в зимний вечерок
Иль скучной осенью при самоваре,
Или весною, обходя лесок,
Поёт уныло русская девица,
Как музы наши грустная певица. (XIV)

Гром «чисток», который ударил в «старых большевиков», героев его юности, потряс Бомстона до глубины души, чего в молодости, во дни Ленина, не могли сделать с ним никакие стоны из Соловков и с Лубянки. (Chapter Twelve, 5)

The thunderclap of purges that had affected 'old Bolsheviks,' the heroes of his [Nesbit's] youth, had given him a salutory shock, something that in Lenin's day all the groans coming from the Solovki force labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon had not been able to do. (Chapter Thirteen, 5)

There is Lubyanka in golubyanka (small blue butterfly). 'Which reminds me painfully of the golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,' remarked Demon with a sigh. (1.29) Aqua's poor little letters from the homes of madness to Demon were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (Heart rending-Sounds). (1.3)

Nesbit of Speak, Memory is Bomston of Drugie berega ("Other Shores," VN's Russian autobiography). Milord Bomston (who is also mentioned in Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse) is the main character in J. J. Rousseau's Les Amours de Milord Edouard Bomston. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) is known on Antiterra as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, and Mertvago Forever.

As an actress, she [Marina] had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). (1.2)

As VN points out in his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 340), cabinet reculé is mentioned in La Nouvelle Héloïse: Saint-Preux, however, succumbs again in Paris, where, not realizing that his companions have led him to a brothel (as he writes Julie in detail), he mistakes white wine for water and when he regains his senses is amazed to find himself "dans un cabinet reculé, entre les bras d'une de ses créatures" (pt. II, Letter XXVI).