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.
Hello Nabokov Readers
Welcome to all. This is the rejuvenation of a Word Press blogging of Nabokov’s novels that documented a reading journey through all of them in chronological order. I suspended work on the site several years ago because other professional responsibilities kept me away, but now, as an emeritus faculty member, I have the time to get it up and running again. I am blogging all of Nabokov’s novels early and late; the early novels are the translations of the Russian originals into English as I do not read Russian! I began the blog earlier with Mary, and got 80% of the way through the novel before suspending the blog, so I am replicating the entries from the earlier blog here and then finishing off the reading of that first novel. Click on the category links on the menu above to get to the commentary for each novel; right now, only Mary is available. I welcome all questions or responses.
Quickly about myself: I am a retired professor of English from Michigan State University. I’ve authored/edited a number of books on modern and contemporary fiction, the most recent being Knowing It When You See It: Henry James/Cinema, published in the SUNY Press In . . . Theory Series. Currently, I am co-editing an encyclopedia of contemporary American fiction 1980-2020 with Stephen Burn and Lesley Larkin. Thanks for checking in on my blog!