Murder in the Name of Love Anonymous College

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta” and Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling” both explore relationships focusing on the point of view of only one, Victor and Olenka respectively, in the relationship(s). The relationships in both stories end in the death of the people partnered with Victor and Olenka, insinuating a link between death and not having one’s side of the story told. Both Victor and Olenka take on multiple lovers and seemingly use the ones that eventually die for their own emotional deficiencies, stripping them of their ability to speak their story, thereby killing them in the short story and literally in the plot. Victor uses his mistress, Nina, as a metaphor for the past in the text, and she dies once Victor decides to live in the present. Olenka kills two men by literally taking their identities from them upon marrying due to a lack of her own. In both stories, the protagonists kill their lovers by stripping them of their identities and their right to their point of view, both demonstrating a common theme of love as a potentially murderous emotion by taking away a partner’s right to their own story.

Throughout the text, Victor’s narrative flashes to different, non-chronological points in the past and the present,...