How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
….the blurred Mount St George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910… (1)
Setting is hugely important in "Spring in Fialta." In this case, we start the story on a note of transience. Things change. This theme will then get translated to Victor’s relationship with Nina. Stay tuned.
Quote #2
Her fiancé was a guardsman on leave from the front, a handsome heavy fellow, incredibly well-bred and stolid, who weighed every word on the scales of the most exact common sense and spoke in a velvety baritone, which grew even smoother when he addressed her; his decency and devotion probably got on her nerves; and he is now a successful if somewhat lonesome engineer in a most distant tropical country. (10)
Nina’s tendency to change men at the drop of a hat is a big part of her character. This is a double-edged sword for Victor; it means she will never be able to commit to him, but it also means that her marriage is an open one.
Quote #3
How familiar to me were her hesitations, second thoughts, third thoughts mirroring first ones, ephemeral worries between trains. She had always either just arrived or was about to leave, and of this I find it hard to think without feeling humiliated by the variety of intricate routes one feverishly follows in order to keep that final appointment which the most confirmed dawdler knows to be unavoidable. (17)
This ominous "final appointment" and the later mention of an "eternal sleeping car" hint at Nina’s eventual death. Her "ephemeral" characteristics, as Victor describes them, are matched by the transient nature of her existence. Anything can come and go with trains, even a human life.
Quote #4
Brightly she signaled to me with her flowers; I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met. (19)
Trains have a lot to do with transience in "Spring in Fialta." You can check out Symbols, Imagery, and Allegory for more, but for now, think about the phrase "everything is something trembling on the brink of something else." We can apply this passage to Victor’s narrative itself: a story set in reality, but trembling on the brink of the narrator’s fantasy.
Quote #5
Again and again she hurriedly appeared in the margins of my life, without influencing in the least its basic text. (31)
Nina, because of the fleeting nature of her appearances, can’t ever be anything real in Victor’s life. She’s restricted to the fantastical, to his memories and his vague hopes.
Quote #6
…the yellow car I had seen under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta, having run at full speed into the truck of a traveling circus entering the town, 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 after all to be mortal. (41)
Initially, "Spring in Fialta" explores the transience of love, memory, pain, and emotion. It’s not until the text focuses on Nina’s death that we realize it is also about mortality, or the transience of life.