I notice that шулер, Russian
for "card-sharper," is explicitly, not only
implicitly, present in Ada: "Mr Plunkett had been, in the summer
of his adventurous years, one of the greatest shuler's, politely called
'gaming conjurers,' both in England and America." (1.28)
Because in his "Annotations" Boyd doesn't
mention uncle Ruka who, like Van, managed to cheat a cheater in a poker
game, I deduce that the Russian passage I quoted in my previous
post isn't in Conclusive Evidence either. It is only in "Другие берега"
and proves inaccessible not to Jansy alone.
Pity that, speaking of card games as a
theme running through Russian literature, Boyd doesn't mention Satin, the
card-sharper in Gorky's play Na dne ("At the Bottom," 1902). By the
way, it is the shuler Satin whom Gorky (who confessed that he
hated truth) makes to pronounce the famous words: "Lying
is religion of slaves and masters, truth is God of a free
man."
Alexey Sklyarenko