Dear List,

Please, excuse me for returning to the same “bunny” subject again but, as usual, I drowned my initial observations under a load of quotes.

The fact is that I’m too pleased to have been taken in by a master conjurer not to expect some kind of echo from the Nablers - after being able to demonstrate how one of VN’s audiovisual “sleights of words” operate.*  Only  after Joseph Aisenberg wondered about the sound of the “o” in Lolita and in “lollipop” that it occurred to me that I’d placed the words “Haze” and “Hase” side by side in my mind, not noticing that VN had  avoided to pronounce them together during a recorded interview. He stuck to “bunny” and “hare”.
Nabokov must have either expected his Playboy interviewer to say it aloud or that his reader would fill it in graphically after finding its reference in print:
V.Nabokov: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname “Haze,” where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean a small German hare. Playboy: You’re making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German term for rabbit—Hase.  Could we consider this manoeuver as a “knight’s move”?

Jansy Mello

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*- Brian Boyd wrote to the VN-L in 2001: "… The two most important of the rabbit doctors, Krolik and Lagosse, have strong associations with eros and erotica.[   ]Somehow Playboy and its Bunny evoked an echo in VN's mind with butterflies and The Beau and the Butterfly.[  ] No one is likely to be able to discover when Nabokov first noticed that the names of two celebrated lepidopterists, Seitz and Krulikowsky, both "belonged to the leporine group," but with his eye for pattern and his early knowledge of both lepidopterists, it may well have been a "found pattern" that sat dormant in his mind for a long time until the Playboy-Bunny-Beau-Butterfly prompted him to complicate the pattern much further [  ] Vladimir Nabokov Forum - https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;71105483.0102