Jansy,
 
Thanks for telling me about the cognac Bras d'Or. Mixed with Napoleon (the only French cognac I've ever heard of and have even tasted), and a number of other liquors (a strange cocktail indeed) mentioned in my in-vino-veritas piece, it will make my charadoid article (or, if you prefer, "spheroid* book", because, practically finished now, it has almost four hundred pages) even stronger.
 
Libra: if mirrored (say, in the clear waters of the Mediterranian), the Latin letter L turns into the Cyrrilic letter Г (corresponding to the Latin G). Blended with "altar" (in Mtsyri, Lermontov compares Caucasian mountains to smoking altars; see Speak, Memory, p. 129 of the Penguin edition), Libra, with the inverted initial, becomes Gibraltar (known as "Altar" on Antiterra; cf. "A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth - say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia": 1.3). Gibraltar is paired with Tsarskoe Selo (the site of Pushkin's Lyceum) in Pushkin's poem "The stirless sentinel drowsed on the treshold of the tsar's palace..." (1824), in which Napoleon's shade visits tsar Alexander I:
 
"From the billows of the Tiber to the Vistula and the Neva,
From the lindens of Tsarskoe Selo to the towers of Gibraltar"
 
(see also my article "Russian Poets and Potentates as Scots and Scandinavians in ADA" in The Nabokovian # 56, 57)
Note that Tibr (Russian name of Tiber) = Brit, Visla (Russian name of Vistula) = sliva (Russian for "plum") = vials, not to mention again the anagrams of "Neva". There are more anagrams in ADA and in the books to which there are allusions in ADA than it can seem. No one, except Nabokov, seems to have noticed that Yashvin (Vronsky's friend in "Anna Karenina") = vishnya (Russian for "cherry"). 
 
*shar, present in charadoid (a charade-like puzzle, the word coined by Ilf and Petrov, after the model of German Arithmomoid), is Russian for "sphere" (but in Polar regions can also mean "strait", cf. Matochkin shar separating the two islands of Novaya Zemlya; cf. Bering Strait, "the ha-ha of a doubled ocean", as Van calls it, 1.3, separating Russia from America that was absent, because of a publisher's overlook, on a globe that drove mad the poor geographer in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf"; cf. Strait of Gibraltar ). In German, Schar means "multitude".
 
As to your suggestion that I accept British pounds, I can accept everything, even Mongolian tugriks. In parenthesis, I would like to say that I need money not to taste expensive champagne (Veuve Clicquot, Moёt, etc.), cognac (which I do not drink anyway) and exotic cocktails but to continue my work on Nabokov. I can get really drunk only on books and I find VN by far the most intoxicating writer. It will be a pity if I have to abandon the Nabokov studies because of financial reasons.
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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