To Clayton Smith: I was very interested in your connection of Hazel to Mascagni's /Iris/, including the blind father's rejection and the further connection to a famous butterfly. However, I think it's more something that the reader can enjoy than something we can feel sure Nabokov had in mind. (So it's in the same category as the connection to Cabell's /Cream of the Jest/ that I suggested here: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0909&L=nabokv-l&P=3170 )
To Alexey Sklyarenko: I must report the prosaic fact that "beaver" is obsolete slang for "beard" or "a bearded man". See Partridge and Beale: /A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English/, p. 62.
http://books.google.com/books?id=tvRp1whVFUsC&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The double connection to Castro and the vegetarianism of beavers (both which I would never have thought of) may be more things we can enjoy than things Nabokov had in mind.
By the way, "beaver" is also slang for a woman's pubes. This is attested back to 1927 but didn't become popular till the 1960s, according to Dalzell, /The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English/, p. 57.
http://books.google.com/books?id=5F-YNZRv-VMC&pg=PA57#v=onepage&q=&f=false
It's still possible that Nabokov knew it. If so, it seems in character for Gerald Emerald, as Kinbote shows him to us, to use this hidden sexual vulgarity to the secretary. But Nabokov may not have known it or intended it at all.
Jerry Friedman
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