In Sapogi vsmyatku (Nonsense, literally: "soft-boiled boots"), a story Chekhov wrote for Madame Kiselyov's children, the grandfather suffers from indigestion and therefore smells bad:

 

 

The coachman in "Ardis the First," Ben Wright (nicknamed by servants "Bengal Ben"), is associated with pets (farts):

 

'Oh dear! I doubt strongly he ever was in that Rajah's service. (1.13)

 

The characters of Sapogi vsmyatku include two aunts: Zhozefina Pavlovna (who smells of perfume) and Mordemondia Vasilievna (who came to a visit from Chernigov). Bogemski's writings are also mentioned:

 

 

Pet is Lucette's nickname. Ada to Lucette: 'Pop in, pet (it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882). (2.8)

 

On Van's first day in Ardis Marina asks Ada (Van's sister who will become his life-long lover) to show him the house:

 

 

Pollice verso is a novel (1901) by Alexey Lugovoy (the penname of A. A. Tikhonov, a friend and correspondent of Chekhov, the editor of the Niva literary review). Lugovoy comes from Luga, the town about 100 miles south of St. Petersburg on the Warsaw highway where Tikhonov lived. Like Kitezh, Tarn (the New Reservoir) is a rectangular lake. In letters to his brother Alexander and to his friends Chekhov describes the pond in his Melikhovo country seat (in the Province of Moscow):

 

While Ada hints at ad (Russ., hell; cf. teper' iz ada, 'now is out of hell,' in Aqua's suicide note, 1.3), Ardis (Daniel Veen's family estate) looks like a corruption of "paradise." In 1890 Chekhov went to Sakhalin (then a place of penal servitude) where he spent three months collecting material for a book and taking a census of the island's inhabitants (i. e. of the convicts). In a letter of December 10, 1890, to I. L. Leontiev-Shcheglov Chekhov (who returned home via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon) writes that he was in ad (Sakhalin) and in paradise (Ceylon):

 

Я был и в аду, каким представляется Сахалин, и в раю, т. е. на острове Цейлоне. Какие бабочки, букашки, какие мушки, таракашки! ("What butterflies, what small insects!"*)

 

In 1891 Chekhov went to Europe for the first time and visited Venice. In a letter of March 24, 1891, to his brother Ivan Chekhov writes: "I have never in my life seen a town more marvellous than Venice." To Madame Kiselyov he writes on the same day: "I am in Venice. You may put me in a madhouse... The shade of the lovely Desdemona sends a smile to the District Captain." On the next day he adds in another letter to her: "In short, there is not a spot that does not call up memories and touch the heart. For instance, the little house where Desdemona lived makes an impression that is difficult to shake off."

 

After Lucette comitted suicide (dying an Ophelian death), Van writes to Ada in a letter that on this planet Lucettes are doomed (3.6). A couple of years later Demon perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster, which means that Van can meet at last his Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander, a modest man reminiscent of Chekhov and his likeable intelligent characters). After a long separarion they make love (deceiving Ada's husband) again, and Van, describing his ten secret trysts with Ada, calls his and Ada's native planet "Desdemonia:" 

 

That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white 'Nuremberg Virgin'-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor - in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. (3.8)

 

In a letter of April 1, 1891, Chekhov writes to Madame Kiselyov from Rome:

 

 

Veen is a Dutch name. It means in Dutch what Neva does in Finnish: "peat bog." Like Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, VN "was born upon the Neva's banks." In Pushkin's novel in verse Onegin tells Lenski (Olga's fiancé) that he would have preferred the elder sister, Tatiana:

 

up in that silly sky." (Three: V: 6-12)

 

Because he is not a poet, or for some other reason (Lucette is a neutral child of eight when fourteen-year-old Van comes to Ardis and falls in love with twelve-year-old Ada), Van chooses the wrong girl. In the epilogue of VN's Family Chronicle Ada tells Van:

 

'Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her [Lucette] enough. That's whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right - I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!' (5.6)