JM: it's not the first time
that Nabokov mentions a "coeur de boeuf," is it? ( in Pale
Fire?)
Harfar Baron of Shalksbore was nicknamed Curdy
Buff by his admirers (Kinbote's note to Lines 433-434).
JM's "Scrotom" should be
scrotum. Btw., scrotum shares its first three
letters with Screepatch, the newly elected president of the United Americas
(3.4). Mr. Alexander Screepatch is a namesake (in fact, he may be the same
person) of Sashka skripach (Sashka the fiddler), the hero of
Kuprin's story Gambrinus, and Mandelshtam's Aleksandr Gertsovich, a
Jewish musician. But one also remembers Pushkin's poem "K kastratu
raz prishyol skrypach..." ("A fiddler came once to a eunuch..." 1835), in
which bezmudyi (vulg., castrated) rhymes with izumrudy
(emeralds).
I notice that Armenian was misspelled in my
previous message.
Alexey Sklyarenko