Dear Jansy,
I'm afraid I only succeeded in misleading you
even more with my comments. What is strange, you seem to be aware of the passage
absent from Speak, Memory but present in "Другие берега" (Chapter
Three, 5;* it is in the paragraph following the one that ends: "He was
extremely good at poker"): "в каком-то иностранном притоне, где молодого
Г., неопытного и небогатого приятеля Василья Ивановича, обыграл шулер, - Василий
Иванович, знавший толк в фокусах, сел с шулером играть и преспокойно передёрнул,
чтобы выручить приятеля". I hope someone with better English than mine will
translate this passage for you, if it doesn't exist in English (in
Conclusive Evidence). The word шулер is implicitly present in
Ada ("I have often wondered why the Russian for it... is the same as
the German for 'schoolboy' minus the umlaut..." 1.28). As you know, German for
'schoolboy' is Schüler.
Another word that begins with an L
and happens to be an anagram of "lair" and "liar" is lira
(Russian for "lyre"). One also remembers the family name Larin, of the two girls
and their mother, in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
*in Speak, Memory: Three, 4
Alexey Sklyarenko