When Linda Snopes Kohl tells the Mallisons "about the people" in the Spanish Civil War, she includes "a Russian poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed" (241). It's not clear whom Faulkner has in mind, if he has a real poet in mind at all, but since the other two writers Linda mentions - Hemingway and Malraux - are historical figures who were in Spain, he may mean Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who was killed fighting for the Republicans in that war.
Ernest Hemingway, the American Modernist writer who was Faulkner's contemporary, acquaintance and rival, covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent during 1937 and 1938, which is when Linda Snopes Kohl could have met him.
During Manfred de Spain's campaign for Mayor, his opponents start a rumor that he got the scar on his face from "a Missouri sergeant with a axe in a crap game" instead of from an enemy soldier while in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (142).
This is the "feller" - i.e. the fellow - mentioned by Ratliff who was "pistol-whipped" by Clarence Snopes when he was constable in Frenchman's Bend, and who complained effectively enough to get Clarence removed from the position (68).
The novel mentions in passing that Will Varner looks "like what his father had been," a Confederate cavalrymen who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest (18).
Will Varner's father had been "one of Forrest's cavalrymen" during the Civil War (18). Before the war Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave-dealer in Memphis. During the War he rose to the rank of general and, in command of a cavalry unit, led much of the fighting and skirmishing in the areas of Tennessee and Mississippi in which Yoknapatawpha is imaginatively located.
