While I was busy with Nabokov's "Pegasus" (winged-horse) and "Sirin" (winged queen), passing through Steinberg's sphynxes and harpies, Angela Dekeulenaar, a friend who lived in Thailand for many years, exclaimed: But these images are quite similar to the "Kinnara"!

A quick wikisearch confirmed her observation: " In Buddhist mythology and Hindu mythology, a kinnara is a paradigmatic lover, a celestial musician, half-human and half-horse (India) or half-bird (south-east Asia). Their character is clarified in the Adi parva of the Mahabharata, where they say: We are everlasting lover and beloved. We never separate. We are eternally husband and wife; never do we become mother and father. No offspring is seen in our lap. We are lover and beloved ever-embracing. In between us we do not permit any third creature demanding affection. Our life is a life of perpetual pleasure.
They are also featured in a number of Buddhist texts, including the Lotus Sutra. An ancient Indian string instrument is known as the Kinnari Veena.
In Southeast Asian mythology, Kinnaris, the female counterpart of Kinnaras, are depicted as half-bird, half-woman creatures. One of the many creatures that inhabit the mythical Himavanta. Kinnaris have the head, torso, and arms of a woman and the wings, tail and feet of a swan. She is renowned for her dance, song and poetry, and is a traditional symbol of feminine beauty, grace and accomplishment."

Buddhist and Hindu mythology describe half-human/half-horse or half-bird, but no winged horse sprouting from Medusa's blood with impatient hooves on Castalia*. Some have tail and feet of a swan. There's an ancient string instrument called Kinnari Veena. Their words (quoted from the Mahabharata) could have been pronounced by Vaniada, the two incestuous, sterile Veen lovers* - and from Nabokov's recurring references ( "Pnin's the Winds,", "Pale Fire"...), he was quite familiar with terms such as "the primal scene" and the "oedipus complex," although I doubt it that he'd read Melanie Klein (the name Melanie, meaning "black", arises once in a while, but I don't think it is a reference to her)

* - Castalia is a spring on Mount Parnassus, near Delphi. It is said to have been created when the winged-horse Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof, and to be frequented by the Muses and Apollo and has thus come to be known as a fount of poetical inspiration. It is said the Castalia could inspire the genius of inspiration to those who drank her waters or listened to their quite sound. The springs are regarded, even today, as a source of inspiration.

** - Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein considers the eternally united parental couple ( "the combined parent figure") as any normal baby's fantasy at a very early stage. The combined parent figure is an early and primitive version of Freud's concept of the primal scene. Those phantasies however were believed to supervene at a later stage of development."In the powerful phantasies of the early Oedipus complex the infant has terrifying experiences of the parents engaged in a particularly violent and dangerous kind of intercourse (Klein, 1928/1975).Melanie Klein discovered in the panics and night terrors of childhood the persisting of the infant's phantasies of the parents in intercourse. These have a violent tone that matches the violence the infant feels towards the parents at the sense of exclusion.These phantasies are of pre-genital kinds. For instance the parents may be experienced as mutually feeding each other, which then, in response to the child's hatred, come to be phantasies of the parents devouring each other (Klein, 1929). The imagined mutual destruction is usually extremely worrying for the child, and exclusion may be replaced by a helplessness. Read more:: http://www.answers.com/topic/combined-parent-figure#ixzz1IJmzgUWR

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