In my post on Yakim Eskimossoff
(which should have appeared in Nabokv-l after the one on
Yakima jailers) I should have added that Salinger's Esmé
reminds one of Hugo's Esmeralda, with whom Lucette ("our Esmeralda and
mermaid") is associated in Ada.
Also, in my recent posts on Sumerechnikov and Mertvago I
forgot to mention that, in his memoir essay Moscow before the Flood, or
before the Fire, Vyazemski speaks of his Irish mother, born O'Reilly. Cf.
Van's maternal grandmother Daria ('Dolly') Durmanov was the
daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d'Or, an American province in
the Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824,
Mary O'Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. (Ada, 1.1)
Alexey Sklyarenko