Nabokov's "Natasha"; "Bakhtin on the Novel"

Nabokov plays with ideas of the ordinary. There is a prominent magical quality to Natasha's, Baron Wolfe's, and old Khrenov's ways of seeing and living. The younger two characters are especially adamant about removing themselves from the everyday through their imaginations and there's a languid sense of reality detachment. On their outing, Nabokov moves the young couple in and out of the real world first with their stories, then with the empty cafe, the mention of Levitan, and then with Khrenov's ghost. Like Kafka or Burroughs the reader is unsure of what is actually real and what might be a bizarre imaginative tangent, a device created for emphasis or exaggeration.

In class on Wednesday Robin mentioned how difficult it would be to make a movie that actually captured a Nabokov novel/story because so much of his brilliance is in his manipulation of language. This is absolutely true but there is a cinematic quality to his settings. The comparison of the spring day outing to a Levitan landscape is pretty picturesque. Nabokov's attention to detail (clothing, furniture, light, color) brings the reader into the scene, magnifying his facility with magical realism. Also, the "dead little old man with the waxen nose" is quite an image.

Nabokov has an amazing ability to make everything erotically charged: hair parts, hand-washing, lumpy couches, colors even. Actually, he makes everything that would otherwise not be considered in any way sexual, erotic. There's a synesthetic quality to his style that pushes the words to blend ideas as well as color feelings.

Bakhtin's theories of polyphony are applicable to "Natasha" in that nothing of the story would be understood with only one character voice. The three dialogues of Natasha, Baron Wolfe, and old Khrenov exist to elevate one another and create a spherical understanding for the reader. An interesting aspect of this essay is the idea of dialogic hierarchies. Where in Nabokov's short story do we understand who sits higher within the social ladder of the character list?