Alexey Sklyarenko: There is no "Abe Lincoln" in Ada and I don't remember him in Nabokov's other works (not that VN never mentioned him).

JM: Thanks! I don't know why on earth I thought there was a reference, in Ada, to the Gettysburg address. A quick check revealed nothing in it, but my archives led me to an article by Judson Rosengrant ("Bilingual style in Nabokov's autobiography - writer Vladimir Nabokov") and to a foot-note in which I found that Nabokov has translated Lincoln's "The Gettysburg Address." Nabokov often leaves me with the strangest "literary after images"...My abbreviation "Abe Lincoln" was simply a short-cut to Abraham Lincoln, of course.

Lincoln in "ADA" (Brian Boyd's annotations):

quotes from the novel:
"For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra....But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time..."

"In her erratic student years Aqua ...She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town...Some ten years ago, not long before or after his fourth birthday, and toward the end of his mother’s long stay in a sanatorium, ‘Aunt’ Marina had swooped upon him in a public park where there were pheasants in a big cage. She advised his nurse to mind her own business and took him to a booth near the band shell where she bought him an emerald stick of peppermint candy and told him that if his father wished she would replace his mother and that you could not feed the birds without Lady Amherst’s permission, or so he understood."

...............................

37.28-29: the birds without Lady Amherst's: Cf. 38.08-10: "I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Ivan."

38.09-11: I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties—Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine: Abraham Lincoln was married only once, in 1842, to Mary Todd, who survived her husband's death and was officially declared insane in 1875. Their engagement in 1841 was broken off before they were reconciled and married.Since "Abraham Milton" seems a famous figure in Antiterran "political . . . poetical" history (18.04-07), it is worth noting that the real poet John Milton, after marrying his first wife, Mary Powell, in 1642 and promptly becoming separated from her, published the next year his celebrated pamphlet on the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. She rejoined him in 1645 but died in 1652. In 1656, already blind, Milton married Katherine Woodcock, who died in 1658. In 1662 he married Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him. Milton's undated sonnet "Methought I saw my late espoused saint" has been thought to be about either his first wife or, more probably, his second; in a dream after her death, "Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight, / Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined / So clear, as in no face with more delight." But the joke here is that at the time Nabokov was writing one of the most famous women in the world was the wife of current US president Lyndon B. Johnson, always known as Lady Bird (born Claudia Alta Taylor, 1912- ), who was no beauty, but who in 1963, on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, replaced as First Lady Jackie Kennedy (née Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, 1929-1994), who was a famous beauty. (Peter Hayes, nitrogen14@australia.edu, NABOVK-L September 23, 2003). Since Lincoln and Kennedy were both charismatic US presidents assassinated in the 60s of their respective centuries (1865, 1963), and since Ladybird Johnson became First Lady at the end of the term for which Kennedy had been elected, she approximates "Lincoln's second wife." Marina's identifying herself "with famous women" and her apparently irrelevant "ladybird" is triply or quadruply deceptive: it is not a real insect but a painting on the plate; it hides Lady Bird Johnson and Jackie Kennedy behind the named "famous beauties"; it links up with Lady Amherst of Lady Amherst's pheasant fame (37.23-29), with whom Van's memory identifies her-a lady bird indeed-and with the painting of Marina by Tresham (a mirrored "Amherst") hanging above her on the wall and apparently capturing the very scene Van recalls from early childhood.

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