Will Dane: I wonder too if Natasha has inherited some form
of her father's gift. Is her characterization of her visions as "fantasy"
accurate, or is it her way of explaining the troubling visions that she has? At
the end of the story, it seems that Natasha's vision of her father outside the
house is not a result of active fantasizing, but rather something she is
actually seeing. Her version of her father's gift may be a faulty variant, or
perhaps it is an immature version (because of her youth) that will one day be as
accurate as her father's.
JM: I agree with W. Dane that
Natasha's exchanges with her father while he stood by a newstand is
not "active fantasizing" but a "vision"( and, inspite of her flippant dismissal
to the Baron, so were those of the Virgin Mary). Just like the young
girl in Lourdes or "The Song of Bernadette" ( which I'd not have remembered were
it not by the mention of Theodore Dreiser in the
interview S.Klein just sent, with William Buckley Jr., where the
latter says that" In Strong Opinions,
Nabokov wrote, “Ever since the days when such formidable
mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore,
another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted
as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about
so-called ‘great books.’ " ) In Natasha, therefore, the narrator
describes three different expressions of trance-like states: the
Baron's artistic fabulations; the father's feverish dreams and
hallucinations alternating with a socially conscious " gift", and Natasha's
more restricted religious visions. Like W.Dane I think Natasha may suffer
from a "faulty variant, an immature version" of her father's. And yet, I cannot
dismiss the supposition that VN was being ironical in relation to Natasha's
Virgin Mary.