Alexey Sklyarenko: If we trust VN's words in his Wisconsin Studies interview, Kinbote committed suicide on October 19, 1959, the day he completed the Foreword to Pale Fire. ..Pushkin is the author of the elegy To Ovid (1821). He mentions Naso's shade in his poem "To Baratynsky from Bessarabia" (1822):..(To these days Naso's shade/ Is still looking for Danubian banks).Pushkin mentions Naso in Eugene Onegin (Canto One, VIII) … The first name of Bouteillan, the French butler in Ardis, former valet of Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father in Ada), is Albert…

 

JM: Not related, but amusing, is your recollection of Bouteillan’s first name, Albert. We were wondering about Gran D du Mont in the former posting and Santos Dumont’s first name is Alberto.  However, there is nothing of the butler in him. To practice a luxurious life in a balloon Santos Dumont (whose family’s estate demanded that its administrator cross it by train), while in his Parisien gare, built a very high-up perch equipped with table and chairs and had a butler carry  champagne and crystal goblets with caviar up a ladder’s steep steps. Bouteillan and Bout suggest “bouteille/bottle/butler” and I think Nabokov somewhere linked butlers to Ganymede and his various emissaries down to common earthlings.

 

I tried to look through Nabokov’s index in Eugene Onegin, a Novel in Verse but the letters were too small for comfort, and this was merely my initial obstacle.  I wish I knew more about Pushkin’s reference to Naso’s shade…  In the entry he opened with his name (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov) the only works he mentions are Conclusive Evidence, Speak Memory and Gogol (this in 1964?).