NabLer, that's a new word for me, lovely!.[SB:" Greetings, NabLers: I might as well confess that I have these past 10 days quietly resumed my duties at the helm, while SES takes a well-earned break from our weighty responsibility to you."}

Great fun to see Chapman's face at last, with more details related to Shade/Kinbote's wordplay. So there was a score and VN got it slightly wrong but he might have come across the cutting and kept it in his "Pale Fire" shoe-box of treasures he once allowed one interviewer to explore and who mentioned (in SO, I think) various curiosities ( "Torso beats chair," or something like that).

In this realm, related to a former posting of Carolyn to Matt Roth, I have a little story that somehow relates to the werewolf theme under discussion (this is the only Nabokovian link to justify its inclusion) : While I was in Rome, a guide explained (rather brashly, I think) that the famous she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remo was not a real wolf. The word for the red light zones (less chic than Eric Veen's Villa Venus)in Latin is "lupanarium" and "lupus" being the word for a wolf, the prostitutes were seen as "she-wolves" so that, probably, the foundling twins were nourished by a prostitute, then poetically or prudishly represented as a wolf.

I pass the information on for what's worth but I doubt its veracity. The two heroes, at least under a structural analysis of myths, followed the traditional routine of being abandoned at birth by their real parents, transported over water in a basket, adopted by royalty aso. I prefer to adhere to the real she-wolf vision.