Spring in Fialta: Difference between revisions
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Victor, the narrator, serendipitously encounters Nina, a fellow [[White émigré|exile]], at Fialta, a fictional [[Mediterranean]] town on the [[French Riviera]]. Both are married and have met on several flirtations over the years since their first kiss in Russia, “at the margins of [his] life”. |
Victor, the narrator, serendipitously encounters Nina, a fellow [[White émigré|exile]], at Fialta, a fictional [[Mediterranean]] town on the [[French Riviera]]. Both are married and have met on several flirtations over the years since their first kiss in Russia, “at the margins of [his] life”. |
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She is attractive, seemingly aloof, and ephemeral, and though he still feels deep affection for her, |
She is attractive, seemingly aloof, and ephemeral, and though he still feels deep affection for her, lacks the conviction of true love. He has remained faithful in his own marriage, while she has had multiple affairs that have gone ignored by her husband, Ferdinand, beyond his using them for business connections. |
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The story drifts between past and present, recalling past encounters. It also relates Victor's deprecatory and possibly jealous views of Ferdinand, with whom he is nominally friends but secretly views as an “arrogant” Franco-Hungarian writer and a “weaver of words”. |
The story drifts between past and present, recalling past encounters. It also relates Victor's deprecatory and possibly jealous views of Ferdinand, with whom he is nominally friends but secretly views as an “arrogant” Franco-Hungarian writer and a “weaver of words”. |
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Revision as of 23:47, 23 February 2019
"Spring in Fialta" is a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1936, originally as Весна в Фиальте (Vesna v Fial'te) in Russian, during his exile in Berlin. The English translation was performed by Nabokov and Peter Pertzov. Spring in Fialta is included in Nine Stories and Nabokov's Dozen.
Synopsis
Victor, the narrator, serendipitously encounters Nina, a fellow exile, at Fialta, a fictional Mediterranean town on the French Riviera. Both are married and have met on several flirtations over the years since their first kiss in Russia, “at the margins of [his] life”.
She is attractive, seemingly aloof, and ephemeral, and though he still feels deep affection for her, lacks the conviction of true love. He has remained faithful in his own marriage, while she has had multiple affairs that have gone ignored by her husband, Ferdinand, beyond his using them for business connections.
The story drifts between past and present, recalling past encounters. It also relates Victor's deprecatory and possibly jealous views of Ferdinand, with whom he is nominally friends but secretly views as an “arrogant” Franco-Hungarian writer and a “weaver of words”.
At the end of their meeting, Victor declines to join Nina and her husband on a car ride. His last words to her are a suggestion that he may love her, immediately after which he says he is "only joking". Later, he learns they have been in a car crash in which Ferdinand, the "invulnerable rogue", escapes with minor injury, but in which Nina perishes.
Comments
The story incorporates many of Nabokov’s themes and techniques that are present in later novels: recreating events by memory, the issue of reality, relationship to women, the sense of loss, recalling Russia, the relationship to the double, the unreliable narrator, and a narrative flow that is non-chronological. It has been argued that both the narrator as well as Nina’s husband bear resemblances to Nabokov.[1] While the plot is invented it has been suspected that the encounter is a "tangential record" of Nabokov's first extramarital affair.[1] Nabokov's attempts to publish the manuscript in English when in America was met with initial disappointments, he talked about a "boomerang variety of manuscript".[2]
References
- ^ a b Field, Andrew. VN The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Crown Publishers, New York (1986) ISBN 0-517-56113-1
- ^ Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladim Nabokov). Random House New York (1999). ISBN 0-679-44790-3 (hc.)