The winter of 1939-1940 turned out to be the last for my Russian prose... Among those written during these farewell Paris months was a novel that I did not have time to finish before leaving and to which I did not return. After subtracting two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed this unfinished thing. The first chapter, titled Ultima Thule, appeared in print in 1942... Chapter Two, Solus Rex, had been published earlier... Perhaps, after I finished this book, readers would not have had to guess: Is Falter a charlatan? Is he a real seer? Or is he a medium by which the narrator's dead wife tries to convey a vague outline of a phrase recognized or not recognized by her husband. However, one thing is clear: creating an imaginary country (an occupation that at first was only a way for him to escape from grief, but eventually turned into a self-sufficient artistic mania), the widower became so accustomed to Tula that it gradually began to acquire an independent existence. In the first chapter, Sineusov says, among other things, that he is moving from the Riviera to Paris, to his former apartment; in fact, he is moving to a gloomy palace on a distant northern island. Art allows him to resurrect his late wife in the guise of Queen Belinda a pitiful deed that does not bring him triumph over death even in the world of free fiction. In the third chapter, she was to be killed again by a bomb intended for her husband, on the Egel Bridge, just minutes after returning from the Riviera. This is perhaps all that can be considered in the dust and debris of my long-standing fictions... The true reader will undoubtedly recognize the distorted echoes of my last Russian novel in Under the Sign of Unlawful Birth (1947) and especially in Pale Fire (1962). I am slightly irritated by these echoes, but most of all I regret its incompleteness because it seems to have been decidedly different from all other Russian things by the quality of its color, the range of its style, something that cannot be determined in its powerful underwater course.