Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020820, Sat, 2 Oct 2010 14:32:33 -0300

Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Hazel and Vair eyes (quotes)
Date
Body
As promised, the references to "vair eyes":

LOLITA: Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.

Age: five thousand three hundred days.

Profession: none, or "starlet."

..............................................

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,

And never closed when I kissed her.

Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?

Are you from Paris, mister?

.............................................

Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.

Ninety pounds is all she weighs

With a height of sixty inches.



PNIN:
Margaret Thayer...said that she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon Professor Pain remarked that...Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur - vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade - 'from columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows - so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.'...('I always thought "columbine" was some sort of flower,' said Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced.)

SHORT-STORIES: The Thunderstom: "The courtyard was empty, except for the old, shaggy dog with its graying muzzle that had thrust its head out of the kennel and was looking up, like a person, with frightened hazel eyes. I looked up too. Elijah had scrambled onto the roof, the iron hoop glimmering behind his back."*



*shaggy dogs are recurrent themes, present in Nursery tale, Lolita, Pale Fire... even in TOoL ( a black bag) ... They apply mainly to Skye-terriers with weeping-willow ears; Cinderella and Cendrillon are also recurrent themes, as are "squuirrel" and "columbine", cf. Ada, RLSK, aso.

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