Dear List,

Could I voice my excitement about Alexey Sklyarenko’s piece in the new Nabokovian? It opens up so much, especially about Vinelander and Lucette in the scheme of things. The Fenist/ Feniks transition is revealing too. Nabokov’s self-identification as a Phoenix might have been motivated as Professor Sklyarenko suggests. But in my ‘Regeneration of a Phoenix‘ article on Ada and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in MLR Jan. 2004, I suggest that Nabokov took it as a private ‘founding myth’ for his own life and work because he modeled himself (imaginatively) on Philip Sidney. Ada is strongly under-pinned throughout by motifs from Sidney’s work and life. (Are we to believe that Nabokov read every instantiation of Arcadia except the foundational one – Sidney’s?) I too took Lucette to be the ‘real’ counterpart female phoenix, because she is ‘red’, where Ada is dark; and saw VN as ‘resuscitated’ in English after dying in Russian, though I’m open to the suggestion that he was actually resuscitated in Russian when the English works were translated into Russian. (Van is resuscitated twice in Ada – Penguin pp. 350-51, and 399.)

Nabokov was typically evasive about the derivation of ‘Sirin’, ranging through ‘Snowy Owl’ and ‘Hawk Owl’ to ‘pheasant’! But he actually calls himself a ‘firebird’: ‘far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity  . . . ‘ (Strong Opinions). Can Russian folklorists explain to us ‘ptitsa’ or ‘Zhar-Ptitsa’ and its relationship to these other mythical birds, please?

Penny McCarthy.