When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it ’s stronger than death but because it ’s weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does.

The stories in this volume fall within the continuum laid out by Catullus’s first two Lesbia poems: from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement. The narrator of “Spring in Fialta” recounts the many missed romantic opportunities he ’s had with a woman named Nina, whom he ’d first met, and kissed, on a pitch-black Russian winter night years and years before. Nina recurs in the narrator’s life like a theme in a piece of music, and every time the strings announce her arrival, the cymbals clash and she disappears. I’d been under the impression lately that I was cooling ever so slightly on Nabokov, that sober middle age had made me less susceptible to his lush lyricism. But rereading “Spring in Fialta” reminded me how much better Nabokov is than everybody else. Not only does the story impart to the reader a profound wistfulness, in which the evanescence of love expands to suggest the fragility of life and time and memory itself, but Nabokov manages, at the same time, to weave into the story secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. There ’s what’s happening with the weather, for instance, the “cloudy and dull” spring of Fialta that, in the background of the narrated events, is slowly transforming, thawing, dripping, and brightening, in order to flash out at the end with the story’s tragic revelation. Along with this, Nabokov has studded the story with recurring details—of the circus coming to town, of speeding automobiles—all of which will figure in the denouement. The literary craft in all this mirrors the literary imagination (the seeing of patterns, the orchestrating of fate) that the narrator brings to his random meetings with Nina throughout the years, a literary imagination that every lover possesses and is a veritable Shakespeare of. “Spring in Fialta” isn’t only about a love fated never to be. It reenacts the story-making we inevitably engage in whenever we fall in love.

[...] One of Chekhov’s admirers, Serafima Remizova, was highly disappointed with this ending. “I read your story,” she wrote to Chekhov in a letter, “and I should like to ask you to write the continuation of it. You have abandoned your heroes . . . at the most critical moment in their lives, when they are about to make a decision. But which one? . . . It is important for someone like you, Anton Pavlovich, who can see into the human heart, to show . . . how happiness can be found in such a situation.”

But the inconclusiveness of Chekhov’s ending, his failure to show how happiness can be found in such a predicament (along with the suggestion that perhaps it can’t be found), is exactly what makes this story one of the greatest love stories of all time. It ends where the preliminaries of love end, after the stirrings of attraction, after the trysts and renunciations and the renunciations of those renunciations, when desire has attained its object and the real, the heavy problems begin.

I’ve read “The Lady with the Little Dog” countless times over the years and my interpretation continually changes. When I was younger (and more sophisticated), I was sure the ending was ironic. The emotional deadness of the lovers’ marriages was sure to infect their own new relationship in time. Reading the story now, older (and more innocent), I couldn’t help finding in Chekhov’s last line a glimmer of optimism. The story seemed to me, this time through, to be about that miracle you come across every once in a long while: two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.