Alexey Sklyarenko: "I guess "a little bird" at the end of my previous post should be "the little bird" (on the whole, I agree with Victor Fet that articles are quite superfluous in English)"

 

JM: It all depends on what one wants to express, no? From my romance-language perspective definite and indefinite articles are fundamental.

I'm always well impressed by the rich links you add to Nabokov's sentences. They reveal a veritable portable library lying in the back.

 

Hafid Bouazza: Concerning the gambling involved and implied, is it not also a wordplay with the slotmachine, a one-armed bandit, I wonder?  Humert Humbert in one stage describes himself as a slot machine dispensing, pouring out money.

 

JM: Perhaps Nabokov is making two, or more, different points when he describes a man with one-arm( or a one-armed man!). 

There is a certain insistence over this theme that suggests it must hold a private meaning to him. 

I roamed through LATH (because of its left-right body-scheme orientation) but only registered one interesting line: "Certain fastidious blue-blooded  animals prefer surrendering  a  limb to the predator rather than suffer  ignoble contact. I left the  Dean  encumbered with a  marble arm that he  kept  carrying in his prowlings like a ...trophy, not knowing where to put it down."

In RLSK Sebastian suffers from pains in his chest and left arm, symptoms of 'Lehmann's disease'. In one of V.'s dreams Sebastian is wearing a black glove on his left hand and from which, when he takes it off, "a number of tiny hands like the front paws of a mouse, mauve-pink and soft" fall out. Van in ADA suffers from a shot that has impaired his shoulders and he cannot resume his Mascodagama maniambulations.