It must be the devil who played his joke on me ("шут пошутил"). Pushkin's birthday is May 26 (June 7, NS). On 27 March 1816 (the day he wrote the first of his 74 letters to Vyazemski, nicknamed in the Arzamas society Asmodeus, whom he had first met in Tsarskoe Selo on 23 March) Pushkin was sixteen.

Btw., Sh is also Shakespeare's initial (in the Russian alphabet). Shakespeare is one of the four writers who are mentioned in The Event (the other three are Rostand, Chekhov and Turgenev).

In his article on Lermontov as the Poet of Superhumanity, Merezhkovski compares the author of Demon to the nocturnal and Pushkin, to the diurnal luminary of Russian poetry. Alphabetically, Nabokov is between Lermontov and Pushkin (the two authors whom he attempts to blend in his play): L, M, N, O, P. Within this series M stands for Meshaev, Merezhkovski and, perhaps, VN's "late namesake" Mayakovski, and O for Opayashin (Antonina Pavlovna's surname), Othello (who is mentioned by Troshcheykin) and Ostrovski (a namesake of Meshaev the Second, Mikhey Mikheevich Krutitski, is a character in Ostrovski's play "Не было гроша да вдруг алтын"*).