Winter of Artifice

The story, in more detail

What's inside

Themes and analysis

These readings discuss events throughout the book, including its ending.

Still amid the moving street

In the revised collection's The Voice, Djuna sees pedestrians moving toward the city's discarded remnants rather than toward a meaningful destination. The passage quoted by Emma Sterry turns ordinary movement into a current carrying people away. Djuna's stillness resists that surrender, but it also leaves her frightened by separation and unable to accompany anyone. Isolation consequently has two values at once: it protects an inward life and threatens the possibility of attachment. The street makes that conflict visible without resolving whether standing apart is a refuge or another form of loss.

The promise in the frog

Lilith's frog episode in that revised text tests the promise that desire can transform its object. As Sterry explains, The Voice sends the frog and makes its transformation depend on Lilith preserving her inward vision of him. The arrangement places the burden of producing a miracle on the person awaiting it. When the promised change fails, the fairy-tale pattern exposes the distance between an assurance and its fulfillment. Lilith's disappointed belief is therefore more than a failed enchantment: it reveals how a promise can ask someone else to sustain the illusion that makes it persuasive.

Why we recommend it

1. 1

   The wound, worked

   The abandonment that started the diary in 1914 becomes controlled, finished art — the novella as exorcism.

2. 2

   The last Villa Seurat book

   Published weeks before the war ended the whole world that produced it — the circle's closing document.

3. 3

   Analysis as theater

   'The Voice' turns the analyst's office into a stage a decade before the culture caught up with the setting.

What this book explores

• DesireAppetite in all its forms, indulged and paid for.
• DisillusionmentWhat's left when the big words — glory, honor, courage — stop working.
• Family & inheritanceParents, children, and the debts that pass between them.
• Memory & the pastThe past rewritten every time it is remembered.

The people in its pages

This edition prints three separate novellas, so the people below do not share a story. "Stella" belongs to a film actress, "Winter of Artifice" to a daughter and the father who left her, and "The Voice" to an analyst and the patients who lie on his couch. Nin names some of them and not others: the daughter, both her parents and the analyst are never given names at all. Two names repeat across the volume without meaning the same person — there is a Laura in the first novella and another in the second.[1]

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  The daughter

  The woman at the center of the title novella. She has waited twenty years for the father who walked out when she was a child, and the book is the few months in which she finally gets him back. She is never named.

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  The father

  A concert pianist who walked out on his wife and three children and comes back twenty years later to court his grown daughter's admiration. Vain, charming, terrified of germs, and unable to tell her the truth about anything.

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  The mother

  The wife left behind in the title novella, and the parent who actually raised the children. A singer with a loud laugh who took three children to New York with no money and sang in a church for pennies. She is never named either.

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  Stella

  A film actress who cannot recognise herself on screen and is jealous of the woman she sees there. She is in love with a married man, and she treats every small refusal from him as proof that the love has failed.

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  Bruno

  A married man in love with Stella, who will not leave his wife and children and does not think that this diminishes anything. He wants to dream with her. She wants to live with him, and cannot forgive him for the difference.

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  Philip

  Stella's second lover in the first novella: a handsome man who brings her joy and asks nothing, until she waits in his flat one evening and finds the rest of his life laid out on a dressing table.

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  Stella's father

  A famous stage actor in Warsaw, white-haired and still playing the lover, whose second wife finally divorces him. He is the reason his daughter cannot believe in love, and he never once works that out.

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  Laura

  The second wife of Stella's father, who forgave him for ten years and then stopped. Her account of the marriage is the clearest and least sentimental speech in the book.

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  The Voice

  A psychoanalyst who sees patients in a room high up in a New York hotel. He is called the Voice because that is all his patients get: he sits behind them with his face against the light. The third novella is about what listening has done to him.

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  Lilith

  A patient of the analyst in the third novella who arrives determined to catch him out and ends by falling in love with him. She has spent her life being leaned on and cannot let herself lean on anyone.

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  Djuna

  The woman whose thoughts open and close the third novella. She lives in the same hotel as the analyst, absorbs everyone else's confessions through the walls, and is the only person in the book who can tell Lilith the truth.

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  Mischa

  A cellist who comes to the analyst about a hand he can no longer use and says nothing about the leg he drags. He has spent his life offering people the smaller injury.

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  Lillian

  A violinist who comes to the analyst convinced she is a criminal and a man, and who cannot make either claim stick. Her two sessions are the funniest and saddest pages in the book.

From the Journal

Stories from the atlas that shelve this book.

Real history

Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin

Nin paid for Tropic of Cancer with six hundred dollars borrowed from her psychoanalyst, then wrote its preface. The affair is the part everyone knows. The money is the part that got the book printed.

Adriana Pope · August 4, 2026 · 9 min read