Carolyn Kunin "wrote to Professor Richard Taruskin, source of the information on the Firebird cult" He informed her that "Sirin actually appears, together with Alkonost, in Rimsky-Korsakov's next-to-last opera, The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia."

Jansy Mello: In Pnin (blurredly related to the skylark - "zhavoronok") there's a "Professor Thomas Wynn, Head of the Ornithology Department, having once talked to him at some party about gay golden orioles, melancholy cuckoos, and other Russian countryside birds..." And, as Carolyn advised the VN-L, "A dip into the archives will reward the interested Nabokovian in associations of larks with madness in poems by Pushkin and Tiutchev" but, although dip I did, to recover postings about a "skylark's day" and Victor Fet's link to the reproduction of lark songs, I was unable to find the promised reward.

In VN's "Verses and Versions" there's Tiutchev's reference to the moment after "the storm withdrew, but Thor had found his oak...// while thrush and oriole made haste to mend/ their broken melodies througout the grove.." and to when Pushkin set "a little bird" free - but no devilish mad skylarks*.

There's also Afanasiy"s Fet's "watching the arrow of a swallow/over the sunset of a pond", vaguely (very vaguely) suggestive of ADA's perch, a fish that Uncle Dan had clocked once, not at Ardis ("arrow") though, but at "another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally..."

If, in fact, under the pseudonym 'V. Cantaboff', Nabokov describes the sirin as 'a glorious variety of the pheasant haunting Russian woods: it remained as the "fire-bird" in national fairy-tales [...] this wonder-bird [...] the very soul of Russian art,' then we may also throw in Pale Fire's "torquated beauty, sublimated grouse" among the avian interconnections.

* - Of course, there's Shelley's contrasting Ode to a Skylark (" All that ever was/Joyous and clear and fresh - thy music doth surpass.") and his description of its winging ("Higher still and higher/From the earth thou springest,/ Like a cloud of fire.../And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.."). Over-interpretation is a dangerous thing, particularly when it is referred to a single intention or source.

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