-------- Original Message --------
Piper Wheeler provided the reference I was looking for. In his article,
"Sources of Nabokov's Despair," published in Gavriel Shapiro's edited
volume, Nabokov at Cornell, Don Johnson suggests that Winifred Roy is a
misprint for Winifred Ray, who translated many books from German into
English in the 1930s. (Most notably, Heinrich Mann). She also apparently
translated from French, but there is no evidence of her having
translated
from Russian, which leads Don to suggest that she translated from
Doussia
Ergaz's Chambre obscure.
Perhaps Winifred's husband was named John!
Eric Naiman