After a perfunctory search in B Boyd's book on Pale Fire for any reference to Pushkin's letters to Natalia N. Gontcharova, with no special results,  I chose to bring up one of these letters, written during the poet's quarantine in Boldino, to indicate its affinity with some of Shade's lines, in Pale Fire ( "L’if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais: The grand potato.") and with Kinbote's commentary to line 502( "An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais’ soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m’en vais chercher le grand peut-être.").]

 

Puskin writes (the quote is in French): "notre marriage semble toujours fuir devant moi, et cette peste avec ses quarantines n'est elle pas la plus mauvaise plainsanterie que le sort ai pu imaginer" [   ] "c'est un grand peut-être, comme le disait Rabelais du paradis ou de l'eternité. Je suis l´Athée du bonheur."*

 

Perhaps John Shade (and Nabokov) saw the "otherword" differently. Nabokov most certainly wasn't an "athée du bonheur"

 

 

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* Pequenas tragédias,A.S,Púchkin. Tradução, notas e posfácio de Irineu Franco Perpétuo. Ed. Globo, 2006 (p.109/110)