Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta"

A lot of people consider "Spring in Fialta" the best of Nabokov's short stories; I'd be hard pressed to disagree. He is working in a difficult structure, where large portions of the narration are in the past. In between digressions to the past, barely anything happens in the present. It could be a recipe for tedium, and it is a great credit to Nabokov's skill that he keeps the reader interested.

Victor runs into Nina by chance in Fialta, a gray, dream-like scene caught between "moist air and warm rain." Both Russian emigres, both married, they have run into each other by chance throughout many cities in Europe, and have had intermittent flings when they came across each other.
Some critics have commented that Nina is a stand-in for Nabokov's native Russia -- something he was enamored with, but, due to the Soviet takeover, could never possess. Re-reading the story, that sounds plausible -- but it wasn't the theme that first struck me.

Victor portrays Nadine as a sort of society woman. She is married to a famous writer and has various muse-like qualities, sleeps (to his apathy) with his circle of admirers, and flits glamorously around Europe. She possesses "a wonderful sunburst of kindness, a cheerful, compassionate attitude with all possible cooperation, as if woman's love were springwater...which at the least notice she ever so willingly gave anyone to drink." And yet -- she is close to nobody. What is glamorous to outsiders is superficiality to those who (should) know her.

At the climax of the story, Victor "grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core..." He professes his love to her and she, in return, acts embarassed and horrified.

Victor leaves Nina and her husband, Ferdinand (a write who Victor despises), by their car. The timeline, forever shifting backwards, moves forward a few days at the conclusion:

I stood...with a freshly bought newspaper, which told me that the yellow car I had seen under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta...a crash from which Ferdinand and his friend, those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate, those basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out to be mortal."

There's a sort of grim irony at work here: by dying while the other, evil men lived, Nina proved that she was different. Still, I prefer another interpretation. Nina, for Victor, was always something not quite human -- an ephemeral beauty that flickered across his life, always going somewhere better, always with the glamor of life at the tips of her fingers. In the end, she was proven mortal. She could not commit to loving anything too deeply; she died as she lived, in perpetual transit from one place to another. At the beginning, we had been conditioned to think of Nina as a marvelous (literally, a marvel) person. Nabokov slowly shades her personality to something darker, completing the transformation with the last lines.

At least, that's the story I enjoy. Maybe it isn't the story Nabokov wrote. What can I say -- it's the one I choose to read.