Analyzing the Narrative Structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta”
“Spring in Fialta,” published 1936, is probably Vladimir Nabokov’s best short story. The experience of reading it is both dazzling and disorienting, partly because of Nabokov’s style, those long, dense sentences full of vivid imagery, but also because of the non-linear storytelling, in which our narrator jumps back and forth between the past and the present. Within this complexity, however, is a meaningful structure, and in analyzing it, one can see the logic in Nabokov’s storytelling choices, the reasons why he orders the events of the story as he does — specifically the way each scene shifts the emotions down a clearly predetermined path, from happiness to nostalgia to romance to wistfulness to bitterness and ultimately to melancholy, a journey that reflects both the central character’s emotional arc as well as the reader’s experience moving through the text. For anyone hoping to write non-linear narratives that jump around in time, “Spring in Fialta” thus provides an excellent example of how to do so while still maintaining and building tension, which is of course the key component of any narrative, as well as structuring a story around a clear emotional progression.
The story opens with a lengthy description of the atmosphere of Fialta, a fictional Mediterranean town where our narrator Victor has travelled for “a day or two, just as long as a breathing spell in the midst of a business trip would allow [him].” The key emotion here is happiness: Victor revels in the cloudy beauty of Fialta and notices a whole profusion of specific colors, objects, and sensory details — beautiful shells in the shop windows, posters advertising a traveling circus, a discarded orange peel, the sound of a thrush, the distant sea. “What luscious elation,” he says, “I felt rippling through my veins, how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutters and effluvia of that gray day.” Narratively, we are establishing Victor’s baseline emotional state, which will of course be disrupted by the events of the story.
Very soon, then, this disruption occurs when Victor notices Nina, the woman around whom the story will revolve. Structurally, we might say this is the first key plot point of the narrative, because the moment he notices Nina, a new tension is introduced: we learn that Victor has met Nina several times over the last fifteen years and that they have a complicated relationship that seems to be something beyond simple friendship but not quite reciprocated love. More significantly, Nabokov foreshadows Nina’s death by having Victor note that he could not have known that this was to be their last meeting, since it would be impossible to meet Nina “beyond the grave.”
Let’s pause here a moment and consider the effect of revealing to the reader that Nina dies shortly after she’s introduced. What effect does such a revelation have? It removes the surprise of the story, yes, but it adds a new tension, what we might call dramatic irony — over every scene we read now, every flashback in which Victor describes a prior meeting with Nina, there will hang the shadow of her impending death.
The first of these flashback takes us back to Russia, when Victor and Nina met, and the primary emotion Nabokov evokes here is nostalgia, not just for the youthful kiss in the snow that he and Nina share but also implicitly for pre-Revolutionary times, that same exile’s nostalgia that infuses so much of Nabokov’s oeuvre. Notice here how Nabokov builds this nostalgia through specific vividly remembered details — the “red barn in the white wilderness,” the “windows light[ing] up and stretch[ing] their luminous lengths,” the “crunch-crunch-crunch” of their feet upon the snow, and of course Nina’s neck as he kisses her, “smooth and quite fiery hot from the long fox fur of her coat collar.” These details are as vivid and heightened as the details of the present scene in Fialta, and in this way they create for Victor, and for the reader too, that nostalgic feeling of a remembered scene that comes to you in flashes of sensory experience and heightens the romance of the moment.
From here, we return to the present briefly, to reestablish the Nina who is with Victor in Fialta and to remind us that those pleasant nostalgic memories will curdle soon into Nina’s death. But then, we return quickly to the past, to Victor and Nina’s second meeting, in Berlin. The emotion here is less nostalgic and more sultry and suggestive — it’s established first of all that Victor was about to get married and that Nina has just broken off an engagement, and these simple contextual facts hint at potential tension between them, the suggestion of a possible liaison, underscored by the details Nabokov chooses to describe, the way she sits on a couch, “her small comfortable body folded in the form of a Z,” the small gesture of her removing a “stalklike cigarette holder from her lips,” and what she says as she sees Victor, “Well, of all people — ”, a line loaded with meaning that heightens the sensuality and possibility. A variation of this scene will reappear at the end of the story with a very different emotional context, but this first time there is an undeniable erotic tension in the moment, setting up a romance between Victor and Nina that the story will now explore.
Then we jump ahead again, a year later, when Victor sees Nina at the train station — only now the suggestive romance of the previous scene has shifted, as we learn that Nina is about to get married. This scene contains what is possibly the longest sentence of the entire story, whose structure reflects this emotional shift: Nina boards the train, and as she pulls away, the narrator thinks about how “all was slipping away with beautiful smoothness” and then suddenly remembers a “song of the last century,” a melancholy French tune which makes him think of “the link between hymen and death” which he connects to two images, first the “last flat little waves sent to the beach by a passing ship” and then “the bronze agony of a vibrating belfry.” These images — the departing train, the waves, the vibrating belfry — all of them underscored by the melancholy Parisian song, together point to a specific emotion, a wistfulness at how quickly Nina has slipped away from the narrator. The nostalgia and the romance of the prior pages in fact lasted only a few paragraphs, and now the narrator has to face the reality that Nina is soon to be married and thus essentially out of reach, the phrase he uses, “the link between hymen and death,” suggesting that Nina’s impending matrimony is not so different from her foreshadowed death. We are not even halfway through the narrative, and yet the narrator’s romantic feelings have already given way to wistfulness, a wistfulness that will linger for the rest of the story, even in the moment when he and Nina finally consummate their strange relationship.
This consummation comes at what is essentially the very midpoint of the story, the same long paragraph with the long sentence depicting Nina’s train car gliding away: we jump forward “another year or two” when, in Paris, Victor meets Nina once again. This time, she leads him to her hotel room, where finally, finally, their romance is consummated. But, far from a feeling of joy or bliss, what we get here is more wistfulness, evident in the images Nabokov chooses for the scene: “a tray with the remains of breakfast — a honey-stained knife, crumbs on the gray porcelain,” then curtains that fall with a “blissful sigh,” and finally, out on the balcony, “a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline” which Victor acknowledges is part of a “growing morbid pathos which was to embitter [his] subsequent meetings with Nina.” Aside from the brief suggestion of an orgasm in the curtains falling with a “blissful sigh,” there is nothing sexual or sensual about these images, and the combination of them, the remnants of breakfast, the crumbs, the smell of gasoline, all suggest further and intensifying wistfulness.
From here, the story shifts into a mood of jealousy, resentment, and bitterness as Victor begins to talk about Ferdinand, Nina’s husband. Unlike Victor, who outside of his meetings with Nina seems to live a conventional life, Ferdinand is a writer who embodies a certain chaotic and creative personality, perhaps, Victor suggests, the only type of personality who could maintain a marriage to the willful Nina. We meet Ferdinand in the past and then again in the present, and we see the narrator growing more jealous and bitter. The happiness of the opening pages has now completely disappeared, and even the romantic wistful feelings of the prior sections have curdled into something harsh.
At this point, the flashbacks of his and Nina’s meetings become more hurried and frenzied, “again and again she hurriedly appeared in the margins of my life,” while the tone shifts too, and the bitterness that emerged in the section about Ferdinand becomes an utter and absolute hopelessness. “With each new meeting,” Victor says, “I grew more and more apprehensive…because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted.” He realizes here that what could have been a wondrous romance fueled by nostalgia is actually something much darker. “Was there any practical chance,” he asks himself, “of life together with Nina?” He finally seems to recognize here, in his first real moment of clarity, that there is no future with Nina. He ends this paragraph by noting how “a store of sadness” had “gradually accumulated as a result of [their] seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings.” The contrast here is telling — carefree vs. hopeless. Perhaps at the beginning, in the Russian snow, or in Berlin with her cigarette holder, Victor and Nina’s spontaneous meetings had a certain carefree romanticism to them. But now Victor no longer feels such romance.
As we near the ending, then, we get one of the more fascinating scenes of the story: Victor tells us about the penultimate time he and Nina met, the time before Fialta, before this story, and the scene, to our surprise, looks and sounds exactly like their second meeting in Berlin which he described earlier, with Nina on a couch, “her body folded Z-wise,” and a cigarette holder at her lips. Has poor Victor mixed things up, we wonder? Is his memory not to be trusted? Suddenly, we begin to question every scene we’ve read and wonder whether the narrative Victor has created for us is somehow false. Even if we still sympathize with Victor’s passion, we start to consider the artificiality of memory, the constructedness of a narrative. That, after all, is what Nabokov has done for us — constructed a narrative out of a series of memories, but done in a way to make it seem natural, to make it seem real. And here, on the final pages, he pulls the rug from under us and reminds us with a proto-postmodern flair that everything in a story is, of course, always artificial. Both Nabokov and Victor are choosing specific memories to create a specific emotional experience.
Nina, meanwhile, even utters the same line when she sees Victor as she did in Berlin, “Well, of all people — ”, only now it’s not romantic or suggestive but full of melancholy, because Victor’s emotions have shifted with his memories. Here then we experience as readers the true genius of Nabokov’s mastery of structure — the same scene is essentially repeated, except now we, and Victor too, feel such different emotions, signaling to us just how far this story has taken us, the emotional journey we’ve taken over the last several pages.
The story ends then with what now seems to be an expected romantic failure: Victor wants to confess his love for Nina, wants to kiss her, but is unable to. And in this moment, its worth noting how the atmosphere of Fialta changes — the clouds lift and the city becomes “saturated with sunshine,” a “brimming white radiance” in which “all vanished, all passed.” At the beginning of the story, Victor loved Fialta for its cloudy romantic gloom. Now he sees the city, and implicitly his romance with Nina, with the clarity of sunlight. Nina’s death in the story’s last line, meanwhile, is the narrative’s final melancholy note.
Thus, we see that, far from being a random series of recollections, an unstructured movement between past and present, or even a simple straightforward chronology, this story is actually very artfully structured, with Nabokov organizing our emotions through his chosen scenes and leading us down a clear path, from happiness to nostalgia to romance to wistfulness to bitterness and finally to melancholy.
As a writer, I find this kind of analysis very revealing. Often when we start writing, we tend to see structure as akin to magic, something intuitive that will simply fall into place naturally. As a result, our early attempts at stories and novels are often messy and chaotic and don’t have a clear emotional progression. Taking a story like “Spring in Fialta,” which on first read appears to be written haphazardly and intuitively, and revealing the sophisticated emotional structure behind it demonstrates just how important it is to outline our stories, to lay out the emotional journey our protagonist will take, and thus implicitly lay out the journey our readers will take too.
