Flavorwire

“Spring in Fialta,” Vladimir Nabokov

One of Nabokov’s most ethereal and beautiful short stories (and that’s saying something), “Spring in Fialta” is a gloomy émigré’s dreamy remembrance of a girl flitting through his life, a girl who “had always either just arrived or was about to leave.” In the end, the story is both a lamentation of her transience (and the transience of a million other things by proxy) and a celebration of the same.