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From the book “The Consolation of Objects“:

“Solus Rex” is a chess term. It means that, in the endgame, a king stands completely alone—that is, all the other pieces have been castled—which can certainly happen in the endgame. The Solus Rex also occurs as a chess problem; or rather, as one solves a chess problem, one gradually realizes that it comes down to a lone king. Here, the black king in Nights of Plague is the protagonist Abdul Hamid II, acting in the background. This vitrine also has something of the impregnable white fortress of Western civilization from my novel of the same name. In view of the melancholy of the fortress ruins, however, these fantasies have lost their determination and energy. Solus Rex is also the title of an unpublished novel fragment by Vladimir Nabokov.