Origan was one of the first great perfumes developed by the famous fumer François Coty in 1905. It is described on the Bois des Jasmin website (http://boisdejasmin.typepad.com/_/2005/11/fragrance_revie_9.html) as follows: “L’Origan (1905) cannot be mistaken for anything but a child of its times. Its soft powdery veil embellished with carnation, violet and heliotrope calls to mind gloves and Edwardian silhouettes. A precursor of Guerlain L’Heure Bleue (1912), L’Origan reveals the same bittersweet anisic top notes that sparkle like diamond dust in its powdery cloud.” An appropriately flowery, synaesthetic description!
Mary, p. 63: “half Pierrot and half Gavroche
Gornotsvetov is described as having a “round, unintelligent, very Russian face with its snub nose and langorous blue eyes (he saw himself as Verlaine’s ‘half Pierrot and half Gavoroche’).” The reference is to the 19th century French Symbolist poet whose poem, “Pierrot,” is the second of the poem-collage “Jadis et Naguère” (1881). Pierrot is the legendary clown or harlequin figure, sometimes associated with sexual impotence, possibly foreshadowing Ganin’s impotence with Mary later in this chapter. Gavroche is a minor character in Hugo’s Les Misérables, a street urchin involved in various plot points and street scenes of the novel who dies during a student protest movement. I have not located the specific reference to “half Pierrot and half Garoche” in Verlaine, though Verlaine speaks of the latter in his letters; clearly, Nabokov has in mind a specific reference, but perhaps we can speculate that the hybrid figure of Pierrot/Gavroche envisioned here in Gornotsvetov’s self-reflection resonates in Ganin’s memories of his affair with Mary amidst the historical backgroup of the Russian revolution.
Mary, p. 63: the story of a love affair
Chapter Nine portrays the roller coaster, sexually frustrated love affair of Ganin and Mary in which illusions and inadequacies combine with “fate” (in this case, the Russian revolution) to produce the sense of loss and nostalgia that seems to haunt many of the romantic relationships Nabokov describes. The chapter begins in the present of the Berlin boarding house where the dancer, Kolin, is making tea for his partner, Gornotsvetov; Nabokov describes this gay couple on p. 68 as “being as happy as a pair of ringdoves” (a kind of pigeon): their domesticity is clearly being contrasted to Ganin’s memories of his failed affair with Mary that follow shortly.
Mary, p. 60: of puns and brand-names
The Mary of Ganin’s memories is surely a woman after Nabokov’s own heart: “She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems.” Perhaps an early signal to the reader that Nabokov’s fiction will be vehicles of serious word-play?
Ganin’s memories of Mary include her carrying “Landrin’s caramels loose in her pocket,” wearing a “cheap, sweet perfume called ‘Tagore,’” and wearing a bow in her hair that looked “in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty.” Noting these references: the Landrin Confectionary Co. was established in 1848 in St. Petersburg and, according to the Landrin website (http://www.landrin.ru/2007/pages.php/fabric/en) “at one time was among the only two confectionary brands to be served to His Imperial Highness, the Russian Emperor.” Continue reading “Mary, p. 60: of puns and brand-names”
Mary, p. 56: windows
Ganin recollects the pavilion in a park where he first met Mary: “In its small diamond-shaped window frames were panes of different colored glass: if, say, you looked through a blue one the world seemed frozen in a lunar trance; through a yellow one, everything appeared extraordinarily gay; through a red one, the sky looked pink and the foliage as dark as burgundy.”
The first example of the “false azure” of the windowpane? The passage suggests that the memory of light passing through glass has the capacity to reproduce the “global affect” of a lost world; note that light passing through a blue pane suggests a freezing of time and the effects of the enormous distance between then and now.
Mary, p. 55: memory and temporality
A key passage as Ganin begins to increasingly dwell in the past of his Russian youth and memories of Mary: “In the sense of routine Ganin’s day became emptier after his break with Lyudmila, but on the other hand he did not feel bored from having nothing to do. He was so absorbed with his memories that he was unaware of time. His shadow lodged in Frau Dorn’s pension, while he himself was in Russia, reliving his memories as though they were reality. Time for him had become the progress of recollection, which unfolded gradually. And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, nor for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.”
This is a complex and intricate example of how Nabokov represents the temporality of memory in his novels, such that the process of remembrance, in effect, replaces daily life as Ganin becomes more embodied the former and more ghostly in the latter.
Mary, p. 49: a sense of smell
Many have commented on Nabokov’s synaesthesia, or the ways in which the senses collude in his novels to produce an effect. The recollection of objects, smells, colors, and light forms much of the content of Ganin’s memories of Mary in chapter 8, but here, in chapter 7, there is a contrast to Ganin’s idealized olfactory remembrances to come. He has received a letter from the unfortunate Lyudmila, which he tears into pieces before reading it: “The stamp had been stuck upside down, and in one corner Erika’s fat thumb had left a greasy imprint. Perfume permeated the envelope, and it occurred to Ganin in passing that scenting a letter was like spraying perfume on one’s boots to cross the street.” This marks the beginning of Ganin’s living in two different time-zones, two different temporalities: the idealized past, which becomes increasingly more real, and the tawdry present, which becomes increasingly more dreamlike and hallucinatory as the novel goes on.
I just came across Vladimir Nabokov: Alphabet in Color, an illustrated book that purports to represent in colored letters Nabokov’s synesthetic sensibilities. There is a forward by Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd.
Mary, pp. 44-47: the work of memory
Ganin reflects on his memory of his first projected and real encounters with Mary: “The fact was that he had been waiting for her with such longing, had thought about her in those blissful days after the typhus, that he fashioned her unique image long before he actually saw her. Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.” Continue reading “Mary, pp. 44-47: the work of memory”
Mary, p. 41: Podtkyagin’s melancholy
The old poet, Podtyagin, talking to Ganin, reflects in this conversation on the value of poetry:
“Do you know, Anton Sergeyevich, today I remembered those old magazines which used to print your poetry. And the birch groves.”
“Did you really?” The old man turned with a look of good-natured irony. “What a fool I was—for the sake of those birch trees I wasted all my life, I overlooked the whole of Russia.”
Podtyagin’s “missing the forest for the trees” seems at once to be Nabokov’s reflection on the missed relation between specificity and totalilty in the romantic poetry of the Russian past, and perhaps an early comment on his lifelong fascination with the vexed relation between “literature” and “reality.”
Mary, p. 36: Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead
After Klara catches Ganin searching Alyorov’s room for signs of Mary, they return to Klara’s room where hangs a copy of The Isle of the Dead, painted by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin; Böcklin painted several versions of the popular image between 1880 and 1886. Here is one version:
Perhaps a visual analogue to Nabokov’s many islands and kingdoms (by the sea), all associated with temporality and mortality?