Speaking of shar, it is also
part of "sharovars" (wide trousers), the word that occurs in the same
paragraph of Ada as 'ribbon boule:' "...several equally implausible
servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed - the word 'samovars' may have
got garbled in the agent's aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and
peanuts from the branches of fruit trees" (1.2).
SHAROVARY - SHAR = SAMOVARY + R - SRAM ("shame,"
cf. Demon's words about the new kerosene distillery near Ardis: "styd i
sram (shame) of our county:" 1.38)
Commenting on samovar, Boyd notes (in his
"Annotations" in The Nabokovian): "the urn Russians use to boil water for
tea, perhaps meant to be introduced for local color - it is a cliché of
Russianness - despite its irrelevance to this scene, only for it to have been
garbled into sharovary."
Actually, the word samovar occurs in
Eugene Onegin:
'Twas growing dark; upon the table,
shining,
There hissed the evening samovar,
warming the Chinese teapot (Chapter Three, XXXVII,
1-3).
Btw., in German Schar means "multitude,"
heap."
Alexey Sklyarenko