Spring in Fialta
"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 Riviera. Both are married, and they have met on several occasions over the years since their first kiss in Russia, “at the margins of my life”.
She is attractive, seemingly aloof, and ephemeral, and though he still feels deep affection for her, he lacks the conviction of true love. He stays faithful in his own marriage, while she has multiple affairs that went ignored by her husband, beyond his using them for business connections. The story drifts between past and present, recalling past encounters, and relates Victor's deprecatory and possibly jealous views of Ferdinand, her husband, an “arrogant” Franco-Hungarian writer and a “weaver of words”.
Victor declines to join Nina and her husband on a car ride, with his last words to her being a suggestion that he may love her. Shortly after this, he learns Nina and her husband died in a crash.
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.)