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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.
truly one of the best short stories in the canon
[...] 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.
Which was exactly what Madeleine wanted. She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. The university’s “British and American Literature Course Catalog” was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like “English 274: Lyly’s Euphues” excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. “English 450A: Hawthorne and James” filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria. Even as a girl in their house in Prettybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach—newly purchased volumes such as Love Story or Myra Breckinridge that exuded a faintly forbidden air, as well as venerable leather-bound editions of Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens—and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks. She could scan book spines for as long as an hour. Her cataloging of the family’s holdings rivaled the Dewey decimal system in its comprehensiveness. Madeleine knew right where everything was. The shelves near the fireplace held Alton’s favorites, biographies of American presidents and British prime ministers, memoirs by warmongering secretaries of state, novels about sailing or espionage by William F. Buckley, Jr. Phyllida’s books filled the left side of the bookcases leading up to the parlor, NYRB-reviewed novels and essay collections, as well as coffee-table volumes about English gardens or chinoiserie. Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better. She had read Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that way. She’d read James Fenimore Cooper. She’d read H. M. Pulham, Esquire by John P. Marquand.
definitely cheesy but i can still relate ofc
[...] Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and power. [...]
lol
“Better cold than sentimental,” Thurston said.
“Do you think? Why?”
“Because we’ve read the sentimental, filial account of a cherished dead parent before. We’ve read it a million times. It doesn’t have any power anymore.”
“I’m doing a little thought experiment here,” Leonard said. “Say my mother killed herself. And say I wrote a book about it. Why would I want to do something like that?” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “First, I’d do it to cope with my grief. Second, maybe to paint a portrait of my mother. To keep her alive in my memory.”
“And you think your reaction is universal,” Thurston said. “That because you’d respond to the death of a parent a certain way, that obligates Handke to do the same.”
“I’m saying that if your mother kills herself it’s not a literary trope.”
Madeleine’s heart had quieted now. She was listening to the discussion with interest.
Thurston was nodding his head in a way that somehow didn’t suggest agreement. “Yeah, O.K.,” he said. “Handke’s real mother killed herself. She died in a real world and Handke felt real grief or whatever. But that’s not what this book’s about. Books aren’t about ‘real life.’ Books are about other books.” He raised his mouth like a wind instrument and blew out bright notes. “My theory is that the problem Handke was trying to solve here, from a literary standpoint, was how do you write about something, even something real and painful—like suicide—when all of the writing that’s been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?”
What Thurston was saying seemed to Madeleine both insightful and horribly wrong. It was maybe true, what he said, but it shouldn’t have been.
“Who’s your father?” he asked Madeleine. “Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?”
“In my case,” Madeleine said, “my father really is my father.”
“Then you have to kill him.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Godard,” he said.
lol
What she hadn’t expected when it came to a fraternity was a sunny-haired silent type like Dabney, learning his lines in a folding chair, in parachute pants, shoeless. Looking back on their relationship, Madeleine figured she’d had no choice. Dabney and she had been selected for each other in a Royal Wedding kind of way. She was Prince Charles to his Princess Di. She knew he couldn’t act. Dabney had the artistic soul of a third-string tight end. In life Dabney moved and said little. Onstage he moved not at all but had to say a lot. His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate.
lol
When Dabney returned from his review with Churchill, he looked even more self-contented than usual.
“So?” Madeleine asked. “How did it go?”
“He says I’m perfect for soaps.”
“Soap commercials?”
Dabney looked peeved. “Days of Our Lives. General Hospital. Ever heard of those?”
“Did he mean that as a compliment?”
“How else could he mean it? Soap actors have it made! They work every day, make great money, and never have to travel. I’ve been wasting my time trying to get all this advertising work. Screw that. I’m going to tell my agent to start lining up some auditions for soaps.”
Madeleine was silent at this news. She’d assumed Dabney’s enthusiasm for modeling was temporary, a tuition-earning scheme. Now she realized he was in earnest. She was, in fact, dating a model.
lmao
“Man, am I ever lucky,” Dabney said. “What would I do if you weren’t around? You have to catch all the subtleties for me, don’t you? You and your flair for catching subtleties. It must be nice to be rich and sit around all day catching subtleties. What do you know about needing to make a living? It’s fine for you to make fun of my ad. You didn’t get into college on a football scholarship. And now you have to come in here and run me down. You know what? This is bullshit. This is total bullshit. I’m sick of your condescension and your superiority complex. And Churchill’s right. You can’t act.”
In the end Madeleine had to admit that Dabney was far more fluent than she’d ever expected. He was capable of portraying a range of emotions, too, anger, disgust, wounded pride, and of simulating others, including affection, passion, and love. He had a great career in the soaps ahead of him.