Vadim Vadimovich writes about his surname that he
can not remember:
"I definitely felt my family name began with an
N and bore an odious resemblance to the surname or pseudonym of a
presumably notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, or Babylonian, or,
maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained émigrés from some other galaxy constantly
confused me; but whether it was something on the lines of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin
or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simply couldn't tell. I preferred not to overtax
my willpower (go away, Naborcroft) and so gave up trying - or perhaps it began
with a B and the n just clung to it like some desperate
parasite?"
If V. V.'s family name is Blagidze (as I believe
Don Johnson also thinks), then it resembles Blagoev, a rather frequent
surname in Bulgaria. Dimitr Blagoev (1856-1924) was the founder and leader of
the Bulgarian Communist party. He happens to be a namesake of Dmitri Insarov,
the hero of Turgenev's novel Nakanune (On the Eve,
1860), a Bulgarian insurgent. The names Insarov and
Starov (the name of Iris's murderer, with
which Insarov rhymes) have the letters a,
o, r, s, v and the names
Insarov and Sirin (Nabokov's Russian nom de plume)
the letters i, n, r, s, in
common.
STAROV + SIRIN = INSAROV + STIR
Alexey Sklyarenko