About the book: year / The history of this text is outlined by the author himself: “The winter of 1939–40 turned out to be the last for my Russian prose... Among the things written in these farewell Parisian months was a novel , which I did not manage to finish before leaving and to which I never returned. Minus two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed this unfinished piece. The first chapter, entitled "Ultima Thule", appeared in print in 1942... Chapter two, "Solus Rex", was published earlier... Perhaps, if I had finished this book, readers would not have to wonder: is Falter a charlatan? Is he a genuine seer? Or he is a medium through which the narrator’s deceased wife tries to convey the vague outline of a phrase recognized or not recognized by her husband. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: by creating an imaginary country (an activity that at first was only a way for him to escape from grief, but over time grew 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 reality he is moving to a gloomy palace on the far northern island. Art allows him to resurrect his late wife in the guise of Queen Belinda - a pathetic achievement that does not bring him triumph over death even in the world of free fiction. In the third chapter, she was to die again from a bomb intended for her husband on the Egel Bridge, literally a few minutes after returning from the Riviera. This, perhaps, is all that can be seen in the dust and debris of my old fictions... The true reader will undoubtedly recognize the distorted echoes of my last Russian novel in the book “Under the Sign of the Illegitimate” (1947) and especially in “Pale Fire” (1962). These echoes irritate me a little, but most of all I regret its incompleteness because it, it seems, should have been decisively different from all my other Russian things in the quality of color, the range of style, something indefinable in its powerful undercurrent…»