Subject
RJ: Spring in Fialta
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE: Extracts from Roy Johnson's monograph on the short stories
of VN were suspended for the summer vacation. We begin again with a
re-posting of what he considers VN's greatest story - "Spring in Fialta".
For those new to the series, this study has followed the development of
VN's literary style, at the same time as making a close examination of his
recurrent themes and his narrative strategies. This story deals with one
of his most famous devices, the use of the unreliable narrator.
NABOKV-L invites your comments and discussion.
DBJ
---------------------------------------------
This week's story - SPRING IN FIALTA
---------------------------------------------
There appears to be confusion over the date of first publication of
'Spring in Fialta' (April 1936) but general agreement that it is the
highpoint in Nabokov's achievement as a writer of short stories: as
Barbara Heldt Monter justly claims "It is as clear a masterpiece among
Nabokov's short stories as *Lolita* and *Pale Fire* among his novels"
(Appel,p.129). It combines a number of his favourite and well-tested
themes - recapturing the past, the Double, amorous yearning, Russia
and The Woman - and to tell the story he combines several narrative
devices - circular construction, absence of 'plot', scrambled chronology,
and unreliable narrator.
Victor, the first person narrator, is a businessman who recounts the
events of a brief visit to Fialta in the early 1930s where he bumped
into Nina, a woman he had known since they were both teenagers in
Russia in 1917, and with whom he has been in love ever since. He
recalls to himself their first meeting and the fact that they have only
met very sporadically since. These meetings are recollected in
flashback and woven very skilfully around his account of the day that
they spend together in Fialta. Both of them have married since their
earlier meeting, and Victor is acquainted with Nina's husband
Ferdinand. They all lunch together and Victor is invited to join them
for a drive but declines. Some days later he reads in a newspaper that
the car was involved in an accident that very afternoon, killing Nina.
The large scale parallels between Nina and Russia are obvious enough
in the light of his earlier stories. Victor meets Nina in the fatidic years
of 1917 and every time they subsequently meet he wishes to lead her
back into the past before bringing himself up to date with their
separate lives. He even draws a comparison between this process and
the narrative strategies employed in Russian fairy tales, wherein "the
already told is bunched up again at every new twist of the story"
(ND,p.5) - a strategy which exactly describes the narration of 'Spring
in Fialta' itself, whereby Victor throws loops into the past in his
efforts to recapture memories of the enigmatic and illusive Nina.
These loops are also thrown from a very slow-moving account of the
day they meet for the last time.
These fragments of memory and the events of the narrative present
are artfully juxtaposed to make this a very successfully executed story
- a "mosaic", as is hinted at in the text itself, rather than the linear
chronology of a conventional tale. The devices used for this skilful
placing are a series of cleverly arranged details which echo and
connect with each other: the repetition of scenes; characters who act
as links; colours which act as leitmotives; and a series of visual clues
which plot the way to Nina's death. All these details and devices are
so closely packed together that several careful readings of the story are
necessary before their significance and the connexions they have with
each other become apparent. To illustrate this point, these few lines
come from the opening of the story:
"I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of
Fialta's little steep streets, taking in everything at once,
that marine rococo on the stand ... and the dejected
poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched
paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe
orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which
retained here and there a fading memory of ancient
mosaic design" (p.1)
Every one of these statements and details has a significance or a
connexion with what is to follow in the story. The pieces of marine
rococo are seaside souvenirs, one of which Ferdinand buys later on in
the story: it is a small piece of marble imitating a local mountain
"showing a black tunnel at its base ... with a compartment for pens in
the semblance of railroad tracks" (p.19). And this description itself
echoes Victor's account of his journey to Fialta by an express train
which "with that reckless gusto particular to trains in mountainous
country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night
as many tunnels as possible" (p.2). This link also helps establish the
Double theme between Victor and Ferdinand, of which more in a
moment.
The circus poster is one of a number which are mentioned like musical
motifs throughout the account of the fateful day, and in the last few
moments of their time together Victor and Nina actually see some of
its performers sent ahead as an advertising pageant. This plotted line
of clues leads ultimately to Nina's death, as it is one of the circus
trucks into which the car crashes. The car itself is coloured yellow, as
is Nina's scarf, the Russian church wax mentioned in one of Victor's
most lyrical memories of her - and of course the unripe orange peel on
the sidewalk would be yellow, despite the fruit's name.
These are the sorts of repetitions and links which give such elegant
form to what superficially appear to be unconnected reminiscences in
the narrative. Victor on entering the town notices someone selling
lollipops - "elaborate looking things with a *lunar* gloss" (p.3) - and it
is one of these - "a long stick of *moonstone* candy" (p.17)[my
emphases] - which Nina's husband is eating when they all meet later
on.
Victor notices an Englishman in plus fours [which many readers have
seen as a Hitchcock-like walk-on part for Nabokov himself], and it is
this man's lustful glance towards Nina which leads Victor to see her.
Later, the Englishman reappears in the restaurant where Nina, Victor
and Ferdinand are lunching. This time his gaze is attracted to a moth
which he catches in a pill box. Similarly, a young girl appears briefly
at the beginning of the story "with a string of beads around her dusky
neck" (p.2) and then again later Victor notices "a swarthy girl with
beads around her pretty neck" (p.18).
These are some of the many small details which form the pattern of
the "mosaic". But they are not just simple structural echoes or walk-
on-walk-off parts for secondary characters which in themselves would
make the story no more than choreographically interesting: they also
tell us something about Victor's reliability as a narrator. In the first
of these examples it seems that he misjudged the Englishman, and in
the second it is evident that he himself *fails* to recognise the little
girl on the second occasion of seeing her. Are his senses as wide open
as he originally claimed they were?
Almost all other commentators on this story take Victor at face value.
He purports to be telling us of a love affair with this tantalising and
somewhat promiscuous woman which has lasted on and off for fifteen
years. Andrew Field, conflating Victor and his creator, discusses Nina
in terms of Nabokov's taste for "acerbic women" (Field, VN, p.163);
Monter describes it as "a love story" (Appel, p.133) and thinks the
Englishman is Nabokov in disguise just because he is a lepidopterist;
and Lee only begins to suspect an element of the Double in the
relationship between Victor and Ferdinand (Lee,p.32).
In fact Victor is one of the most cunningly presented of all Nabokov's
unreliable narrators: he *thinks* he is telling us the truth, but the
reader is given just enough information within his account to
recognise that he is failing to understand the world he is living in,
deluding himself regarding Nina, misrepresenting people and their
motives, and often behaving in a gauchely insensitive manner.
We begin with his own claim to be sensitive, which he repeats for
emphasis: "how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutter and
effluvia of that grey day saturated with a vernal essence which itself
it seemed slow in perceiving" (p.3). Quite apart from the florid vanity
and the absurd anthropomorphism of this claim, all the subsequent
evidence he offers proves that on the contrary he responds
inappropriately to just about everything - but most of all to Nina.
He cannot find a term precise enough to define the nature of the
relationship he has with her - and inattentive readers are given every
opportunity to assume that it is of a conventionally romantic nature.
Yet right from the outset we are also offered clues that it is at the
very least a one-sided affair: "Every time I had met her ... she had not
seemed to recognise me at once" (p.4). In fact on *all* the occasions he
describes except one, he is put out by the fact that she either ignores
him or has forgotten him.
On the first occasion that they meet, even though he knows that she
is engaged to be married, he makes a physical advance to her which
she reciprocates very briefly: but then for the remainder of the
meeting she ignores him. Then on the second - and this is quite some
time later - he assumes a degree of intimacy which could not possibly
be justified, and he even imputes knowledge of it to others: "at once it
became clear to everyone, beginning with her, that we had long been
on intimate terms" (p.9). He does this *knowing* that the one brief
kiss they have exchanged is not sufficient basis for such a claim. And
in addition he is physically importunate yet again: "when that night I
happened to be seated beside her at supper, I shamelessly tested the
extent of her secret patience" (p.10).
This pattern of behaviour is repeated on each of the subsequent
occasions he recalls, with the added twist to his erotomania that he
becomes absurdly jealous and possessive of her. When *years* later he
bumps into her as she is being seen off at a railway station he
describes her as being "in the midst of a group of people she had
befriended without my knowledge" (p.10) and later with her husband
and his friends "doubtless two or three of the lot had been intimate
with [her]" (p.16). He has absolutely no evidence for these
suppositions, but he goes on making them nevertheless. Even when
she is in the presence of her husband, Victor is still physically
demanding and insensitive: "seizing the opportunity when Ferdinand
... stopped at the post office, I hastened to lead her away" (p.19).
All these clues are offered in the smallest scraps of gesture and
movement. When they are walking together, it is Nina who is forced
to adjust her stride to Victor's (p.4) - which reveals his commonplace
egoism. And when he asks her if she can remember when they last
met, he wilfully misunderstands her reaction: "the shake of her head
and the puckered brow seemed less to imply forgetfulness than to
deplore the flatness of an old joke" (p.7).
Victor's grossness and lack of sensitivity are brought to an
impressively dramatised finale just before the fatal crash. Having
prised Nina away from her husband for a moment, he makes a
declaration to her which is simultaneously clumsy and insultingly
phrased, then when it is met with what are obviously horror and
embarrassment he retracts in bad faith and makes another gauche
gesture:
"I said (substituting for our cheap, formal 'thou' that
strangely full and expressive 'you'...) 'Look here - what if
I love you?' Nina looked at me ... something like a bat
passed swiftly across her face, a quick, queer, almost ugly
expression ... 'Never mind, I was only joking', I hastened
to say, lightly circling her waist" (p.29)
This is Nabokov at his very best in terms of subtle narrative. He is
absent from the picture, letting the characters reveal their own
inadequacies. Victor could not be more crass. The choice of second
person plural address is completely inappropriate to such a
declaration; "what if" is hedging his bets; Nina is clearly disgusted; and
the retraction is both quite insincere and negatively underscored by
the possessive arm in a manner which seems designed to produce
embarrassed squirming in the reader.
Throughout the story Victor is embedded in a comfortable bourgeois
marriage, so his rhapsodies concerning Nina are romantic at best and
more probably just wish-fulfilments. For they are based upon no
evidence of reciprocity. There is only one occasion when we are given
anything other than signs of Nina's being either merely friendly or
disattentive towards him. They are in a hotel together when she tells
him that her husband has gone fencing and takes him to her room:
"when the door had been locked ... a little later I stepped out onto the
diminutive cast-iron balcony" (p.12)
These are the only clues we have: there is no evidence of any other
sexual connexion between them in the story - and plenty of Nina's
*lack* of interest in him. There are thus two possibilities: either Nina
is generous and lighthearted and does give herself to him this once,
but takes no serious interest in him at all, or Victor is wishing this
reciprocation into being. This is not an easy crux to unravel - but
there is further evidence in the text to help.
There are several other instances of Victor's stupidity and
contradictions in his own narrative. In addition to his failure to
recognise the little girl and his misinterpretation of the Englishman's
attentions, he describes a holder of the legion d'honeur as "some
Frenchman [who] for some reason or other [had] a little red ribbon or
something on his coat lapel" (p.17). And when he meets Segur, a friend
of Nina's husband, he complains that he raises the weather as a
subject of conversation - even though the opening of Victor's account
centres on precisely the same topic: the story begins "Spring in Fialta
is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp" (p.1).
Victor's account of Ferdinand, Nina's husband, also raises doubts
about the reliability of his judgement. He is quite clearly jealous - "I
would rather not dwell upon him" (p.13) - and yet the description of
his technique as a writer is clearly designed to let the reader see him
in a favourable light: "Having mastered the art of verbal invention to
perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words"
(p.13)
Victor's judgement of this skill is peevish and philistine: "I never could
understand what was the good of thinking up books" (p.13). He later
pours scorn on certain literary techniques, and even though he
subsequently admits that none of it is relevant to Ferdinand, the
smear sticks.
There are in fact elements of the Double at work here - reflected in
the fact that they dress in very similar clothes and their prose styles
are not unalike. We are given a brief extract from one of Ferdinand's
stories:
"Her face ... was rather nature's snapshot than a meticulous
portrait ... all he could visualise were fleeting glimpses of
disconnected features: the downy outline of her pommettes in
the sun" (p.20)
There is an additional complication in the fact that Ferdinand can also
be seen as something of a portrait of Nabokov himself [despite or in
addition to claims for the plus-foured Englishman]. He is given the
same appearance, he writes in a foreign language and enjoys puns, and
he has the same lofty and mocking literary manner. But this detail is
best left to those like Field who wish to read biographical significance
into it (Field-VN,p.163).
'Spring in Fialta' is without doubt Nabokov's finest achievement as a
writer of short fictions, and it bears all the qualities and
characteristics of the very greatest short stories. It has a flawless unity
of time, place, and action, and its flashbacks are very elegantly and
unobtrusively woven into the narrative. It has a dense verbal texture
full of echoes, poetic repetitions, and leitmotives which are firmly
related to its themes. And it has one of the most subtly concealed of
all Nabokov's unreliable narrators. We do not come to his like again
until *Pale Fire*.
------------------------------------------------
Next week's story - CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE
------------------------------------------------
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester 20 | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
of VN were suspended for the summer vacation. We begin again with a
re-posting of what he considers VN's greatest story - "Spring in Fialta".
For those new to the series, this study has followed the development of
VN's literary style, at the same time as making a close examination of his
recurrent themes and his narrative strategies. This story deals with one
of his most famous devices, the use of the unreliable narrator.
NABOKV-L invites your comments and discussion.
DBJ
---------------------------------------------
This week's story - SPRING IN FIALTA
---------------------------------------------
There appears to be confusion over the date of first publication of
'Spring in Fialta' (April 1936) but general agreement that it is the
highpoint in Nabokov's achievement as a writer of short stories: as
Barbara Heldt Monter justly claims "It is as clear a masterpiece among
Nabokov's short stories as *Lolita* and *Pale Fire* among his novels"
(Appel,p.129). It combines a number of his favourite and well-tested
themes - recapturing the past, the Double, amorous yearning, Russia
and The Woman - and to tell the story he combines several narrative
devices - circular construction, absence of 'plot', scrambled chronology,
and unreliable narrator.
Victor, the first person narrator, is a businessman who recounts the
events of a brief visit to Fialta in the early 1930s where he bumped
into Nina, a woman he had known since they were both teenagers in
Russia in 1917, and with whom he has been in love ever since. He
recalls to himself their first meeting and the fact that they have only
met very sporadically since. These meetings are recollected in
flashback and woven very skilfully around his account of the day that
they spend together in Fialta. Both of them have married since their
earlier meeting, and Victor is acquainted with Nina's husband
Ferdinand. They all lunch together and Victor is invited to join them
for a drive but declines. Some days later he reads in a newspaper that
the car was involved in an accident that very afternoon, killing Nina.
The large scale parallels between Nina and Russia are obvious enough
in the light of his earlier stories. Victor meets Nina in the fatidic years
of 1917 and every time they subsequently meet he wishes to lead her
back into the past before bringing himself up to date with their
separate lives. He even draws a comparison between this process and
the narrative strategies employed in Russian fairy tales, wherein "the
already told is bunched up again at every new twist of the story"
(ND,p.5) - a strategy which exactly describes the narration of 'Spring
in Fialta' itself, whereby Victor throws loops into the past in his
efforts to recapture memories of the enigmatic and illusive Nina.
These loops are also thrown from a very slow-moving account of the
day they meet for the last time.
These fragments of memory and the events of the narrative present
are artfully juxtaposed to make this a very successfully executed story
- a "mosaic", as is hinted at in the text itself, rather than the linear
chronology of a conventional tale. The devices used for this skilful
placing are a series of cleverly arranged details which echo and
connect with each other: the repetition of scenes; characters who act
as links; colours which act as leitmotives; and a series of visual clues
which plot the way to Nina's death. All these details and devices are
so closely packed together that several careful readings of the story are
necessary before their significance and the connexions they have with
each other become apparent. To illustrate this point, these few lines
come from the opening of the story:
"I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of
Fialta's little steep streets, taking in everything at once,
that marine rococo on the stand ... and the dejected
poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched
paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe
orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which
retained here and there a fading memory of ancient
mosaic design" (p.1)
Every one of these statements and details has a significance or a
connexion with what is to follow in the story. The pieces of marine
rococo are seaside souvenirs, one of which Ferdinand buys later on in
the story: it is a small piece of marble imitating a local mountain
"showing a black tunnel at its base ... with a compartment for pens in
the semblance of railroad tracks" (p.19). And this description itself
echoes Victor's account of his journey to Fialta by an express train
which "with that reckless gusto particular to trains in mountainous
country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night
as many tunnels as possible" (p.2). This link also helps establish the
Double theme between Victor and Ferdinand, of which more in a
moment.
The circus poster is one of a number which are mentioned like musical
motifs throughout the account of the fateful day, and in the last few
moments of their time together Victor and Nina actually see some of
its performers sent ahead as an advertising pageant. This plotted line
of clues leads ultimately to Nina's death, as it is one of the circus
trucks into which the car crashes. The car itself is coloured yellow, as
is Nina's scarf, the Russian church wax mentioned in one of Victor's
most lyrical memories of her - and of course the unripe orange peel on
the sidewalk would be yellow, despite the fruit's name.
These are the sorts of repetitions and links which give such elegant
form to what superficially appear to be unconnected reminiscences in
the narrative. Victor on entering the town notices someone selling
lollipops - "elaborate looking things with a *lunar* gloss" (p.3) - and it
is one of these - "a long stick of *moonstone* candy" (p.17)[my
emphases] - which Nina's husband is eating when they all meet later
on.
Victor notices an Englishman in plus fours [which many readers have
seen as a Hitchcock-like walk-on part for Nabokov himself], and it is
this man's lustful glance towards Nina which leads Victor to see her.
Later, the Englishman reappears in the restaurant where Nina, Victor
and Ferdinand are lunching. This time his gaze is attracted to a moth
which he catches in a pill box. Similarly, a young girl appears briefly
at the beginning of the story "with a string of beads around her dusky
neck" (p.2) and then again later Victor notices "a swarthy girl with
beads around her pretty neck" (p.18).
These are some of the many small details which form the pattern of
the "mosaic". But they are not just simple structural echoes or walk-
on-walk-off parts for secondary characters which in themselves would
make the story no more than choreographically interesting: they also
tell us something about Victor's reliability as a narrator. In the first
of these examples it seems that he misjudged the Englishman, and in
the second it is evident that he himself *fails* to recognise the little
girl on the second occasion of seeing her. Are his senses as wide open
as he originally claimed they were?
Almost all other commentators on this story take Victor at face value.
He purports to be telling us of a love affair with this tantalising and
somewhat promiscuous woman which has lasted on and off for fifteen
years. Andrew Field, conflating Victor and his creator, discusses Nina
in terms of Nabokov's taste for "acerbic women" (Field, VN, p.163);
Monter describes it as "a love story" (Appel, p.133) and thinks the
Englishman is Nabokov in disguise just because he is a lepidopterist;
and Lee only begins to suspect an element of the Double in the
relationship between Victor and Ferdinand (Lee,p.32).
In fact Victor is one of the most cunningly presented of all Nabokov's
unreliable narrators: he *thinks* he is telling us the truth, but the
reader is given just enough information within his account to
recognise that he is failing to understand the world he is living in,
deluding himself regarding Nina, misrepresenting people and their
motives, and often behaving in a gauchely insensitive manner.
We begin with his own claim to be sensitive, which he repeats for
emphasis: "how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutter and
effluvia of that grey day saturated with a vernal essence which itself
it seemed slow in perceiving" (p.3). Quite apart from the florid vanity
and the absurd anthropomorphism of this claim, all the subsequent
evidence he offers proves that on the contrary he responds
inappropriately to just about everything - but most of all to Nina.
He cannot find a term precise enough to define the nature of the
relationship he has with her - and inattentive readers are given every
opportunity to assume that it is of a conventionally romantic nature.
Yet right from the outset we are also offered clues that it is at the
very least a one-sided affair: "Every time I had met her ... she had not
seemed to recognise me at once" (p.4). In fact on *all* the occasions he
describes except one, he is put out by the fact that she either ignores
him or has forgotten him.
On the first occasion that they meet, even though he knows that she
is engaged to be married, he makes a physical advance to her which
she reciprocates very briefly: but then for the remainder of the
meeting she ignores him. Then on the second - and this is quite some
time later - he assumes a degree of intimacy which could not possibly
be justified, and he even imputes knowledge of it to others: "at once it
became clear to everyone, beginning with her, that we had long been
on intimate terms" (p.9). He does this *knowing* that the one brief
kiss they have exchanged is not sufficient basis for such a claim. And
in addition he is physically importunate yet again: "when that night I
happened to be seated beside her at supper, I shamelessly tested the
extent of her secret patience" (p.10).
This pattern of behaviour is repeated on each of the subsequent
occasions he recalls, with the added twist to his erotomania that he
becomes absurdly jealous and possessive of her. When *years* later he
bumps into her as she is being seen off at a railway station he
describes her as being "in the midst of a group of people she had
befriended without my knowledge" (p.10) and later with her husband
and his friends "doubtless two or three of the lot had been intimate
with [her]" (p.16). He has absolutely no evidence for these
suppositions, but he goes on making them nevertheless. Even when
she is in the presence of her husband, Victor is still physically
demanding and insensitive: "seizing the opportunity when Ferdinand
... stopped at the post office, I hastened to lead her away" (p.19).
All these clues are offered in the smallest scraps of gesture and
movement. When they are walking together, it is Nina who is forced
to adjust her stride to Victor's (p.4) - which reveals his commonplace
egoism. And when he asks her if she can remember when they last
met, he wilfully misunderstands her reaction: "the shake of her head
and the puckered brow seemed less to imply forgetfulness than to
deplore the flatness of an old joke" (p.7).
Victor's grossness and lack of sensitivity are brought to an
impressively dramatised finale just before the fatal crash. Having
prised Nina away from her husband for a moment, he makes a
declaration to her which is simultaneously clumsy and insultingly
phrased, then when it is met with what are obviously horror and
embarrassment he retracts in bad faith and makes another gauche
gesture:
"I said (substituting for our cheap, formal 'thou' that
strangely full and expressive 'you'...) 'Look here - what if
I love you?' Nina looked at me ... something like a bat
passed swiftly across her face, a quick, queer, almost ugly
expression ... 'Never mind, I was only joking', I hastened
to say, lightly circling her waist" (p.29)
This is Nabokov at his very best in terms of subtle narrative. He is
absent from the picture, letting the characters reveal their own
inadequacies. Victor could not be more crass. The choice of second
person plural address is completely inappropriate to such a
declaration; "what if" is hedging his bets; Nina is clearly disgusted; and
the retraction is both quite insincere and negatively underscored by
the possessive arm in a manner which seems designed to produce
embarrassed squirming in the reader.
Throughout the story Victor is embedded in a comfortable bourgeois
marriage, so his rhapsodies concerning Nina are romantic at best and
more probably just wish-fulfilments. For they are based upon no
evidence of reciprocity. There is only one occasion when we are given
anything other than signs of Nina's being either merely friendly or
disattentive towards him. They are in a hotel together when she tells
him that her husband has gone fencing and takes him to her room:
"when the door had been locked ... a little later I stepped out onto the
diminutive cast-iron balcony" (p.12)
These are the only clues we have: there is no evidence of any other
sexual connexion between them in the story - and plenty of Nina's
*lack* of interest in him. There are thus two possibilities: either Nina
is generous and lighthearted and does give herself to him this once,
but takes no serious interest in him at all, or Victor is wishing this
reciprocation into being. This is not an easy crux to unravel - but
there is further evidence in the text to help.
There are several other instances of Victor's stupidity and
contradictions in his own narrative. In addition to his failure to
recognise the little girl and his misinterpretation of the Englishman's
attentions, he describes a holder of the legion d'honeur as "some
Frenchman [who] for some reason or other [had] a little red ribbon or
something on his coat lapel" (p.17). And when he meets Segur, a friend
of Nina's husband, he complains that he raises the weather as a
subject of conversation - even though the opening of Victor's account
centres on precisely the same topic: the story begins "Spring in Fialta
is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp" (p.1).
Victor's account of Ferdinand, Nina's husband, also raises doubts
about the reliability of his judgement. He is quite clearly jealous - "I
would rather not dwell upon him" (p.13) - and yet the description of
his technique as a writer is clearly designed to let the reader see him
in a favourable light: "Having mastered the art of verbal invention to
perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words"
(p.13)
Victor's judgement of this skill is peevish and philistine: "I never could
understand what was the good of thinking up books" (p.13). He later
pours scorn on certain literary techniques, and even though he
subsequently admits that none of it is relevant to Ferdinand, the
smear sticks.
There are in fact elements of the Double at work here - reflected in
the fact that they dress in very similar clothes and their prose styles
are not unalike. We are given a brief extract from one of Ferdinand's
stories:
"Her face ... was rather nature's snapshot than a meticulous
portrait ... all he could visualise were fleeting glimpses of
disconnected features: the downy outline of her pommettes in
the sun" (p.20)
There is an additional complication in the fact that Ferdinand can also
be seen as something of a portrait of Nabokov himself [despite or in
addition to claims for the plus-foured Englishman]. He is given the
same appearance, he writes in a foreign language and enjoys puns, and
he has the same lofty and mocking literary manner. But this detail is
best left to those like Field who wish to read biographical significance
into it (Field-VN,p.163).
'Spring in Fialta' is without doubt Nabokov's finest achievement as a
writer of short fictions, and it bears all the qualities and
characteristics of the very greatest short stories. It has a flawless unity
of time, place, and action, and its flashbacks are very elegantly and
unobtrusively woven into the narrative. It has a dense verbal texture
full of echoes, poetic repetitions, and leitmotives which are firmly
related to its themes. And it has one of the most subtly concealed of
all Nabokov's unreliable narrators. We do not come to his like again
until *Pale Fire*.
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Next week's story - CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE
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--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester 20 | Fax +44 0161 443 2766