Seeing without understanding: Mediality Aspects of Literature and Memory in Vladimir Nabokov's “Spring in Fialta”

Taking as my starting point the intermedial idea that all literary texts exhibit some kind of medial mixture, the article argues that Vladimir Nabokov's formally exquisite and existentially moving short story “Spring in Fialta” (which I analyze in Nabokov's own English translation from Russian) is best understood when it is considered a mixed mediality text. I hope to demonstrate the general idea that when a conventionally literary text is being read as a medially mixed text the role of media turns out to be crucial for the understanding of the entire text. More specifically, I shall argue that the schism between artistic representation and life in itself, condensed into the problem of how to represent and recall memory traces, is a major theme in “Spring in Fialta.”