Which arrow flies forever?

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete

This is an analysis on the short story by the Russian author Vladimir Nabokovs’ A Russian beauty. This analysis will describe the outer and inner plot with an ending part with a theoretic attack. I chose to use a Marxist and feminist perspective when I thoroughly examined the story. Both the feminist and the Marxist criticism are structured by several different items. Usually you do not apply them all to your analysis but decides which of them that might result in a clever conclusion. You can either choose from your own personal interest on the issue, or if not, then after studying the text you ought to be able to see what problem that might suit to apply. I wanted to keep a wide perspective; therefore I chose to mainly present how the female main character is described in the text. I also wanted to scrutinise the power-relations between men, and in this case not women but woman. I mostly focused on the feminist angle on the analysis but to enrich its worth I apart from that added a problem from the Marxist criticism. The item from the Marxist criticism I chose is very similar to the second of the above mentioned feminist items, namely to be able to make the power-relations, not between men and woken, but between the falling class and the bourgeoisie clearly visible.
There are several reasons to why these two literary analysis methods are very compatible with this story. Firstly because it is very interesting to see how a male author shapes a female character, especially since she is extremely protruding in the story. Secondly the relations between men and women appears to be quite odd in the text which makes them interesting to have a closer look at.
This story is about a Russian girl named Olga. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy noble family. There are very colourful descriptions about her beauty of which she clearly had obtained already from birth. All boys and all men craved for her but no one ever fell in love. Olga was very good at French even though she had her weaknesses. She went to church and wrote verse. She lived with her father who was very broad-shouldered in a house on Ausburgerstrasse in Germany. When she grew older things got worse in her life. Her father died and her private finances did not go so well. One day she met her old friend Vera who invited her to hers and her husband’s summer villa. Olga accepted and well there she met the Russified German Forstmann who was a wealthy author. At first they did not say that much to each other but on his last day before his departure ha sat by Olga on the stairs and asked her to be his spouse. Then there is a major gap until we get to know that she died the following summer in childbirth.
There are multitudes of unmentioned things that are hidden from the reader in the story. We cannot possibly be certain of what is really happening but things are being hinted so we might at least get a qualified guess. There are some unfinished sentences along the story where Olga does not tell the whole sentence. As for example when she speaks to Vera for the first time, quoting: “’and besides…’ She added a little detail and Vera burst out laughing, letting her parcels sink almost to the ground. ‘No, seriously,’ said Olga, with a smile.” The reason of why we do not get to know exactly what is said is because it is a secret. By looking at that quote we can see the answer to many things in the story. For instance we get to know why Olga with her beauty is not married and why she at first turns irritated in Forstmann’s company. The reason to this lie within Olga’s sexual disposition, she is a lesbian, which is why she has not gotten married even though all men wanted her. That is also the reason to why she was not very fond of Forstmann in the beginning, because since she was not planning on marrying him she did not, according to her have any reasons of making him like her.
If we apply the mentioned theories we hopefully might get more answers to Olga’s acting. The questions that follow after reading this short story are plenty. Why does she ma...