Illusions of "Spring in Fialta" Anonymous College

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta” explores the protagonist's, Victor's, forbidden and impossible love affair with a carefree woman, Nina. Throughout the text, Victor’s narrative flashes to different, unchronological points in the past and the present, leaving hints throughout the text of the future. Nina’s character is ever-shifting and elusive, yet provides a constant feeling of nostalgia and desire from her introduction in the story. Nabokov’s use of tense shift and flashbacks demonstrates Victor’s distortion of the reality of Nina and the past with his infatuation with both of them. Nina serves as a metaphor for the past in the text and dies once Victor decides to live in the present.

Nina’s first similarity with the past is her unique mixture of availability while being unattainable. During their encounter at the train station, Victor remarks that one moment Nina is “in the midst of a group of people whom she had befriended" and then next she seems to have "suddenly forgotten about [them] or passed into another world, and [they] all, [their] hands in our pockets, seemed to be spying upon an utterly unsuspecting life moving in that aquarium dimness” (418). In the same way Nina is a friend, and more than a friend, to...