The Luzhin Defense [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Vladimir Nabokov presumably chose the English title for this novel because it describes an elaborate chess strategy, one which midway through the book fails its creator in tournament play, and in the end in the game of self-preservation. But it might just as well have been chosen to describe the central character's use of chess itself as a strategic defense against life. Luzhin, from childhood on, is never able to make a connection between himself and the world. His relationship to his parents' life in pre-revolutionary Russia is as abstract as that of an austistic genius' attachment to the complex theory of a computer game. Leaving Russia, such an emotional and nostalgic experience for Nabokov himself, disrupts Luzhin's psyche not a whit, for he has never invested any concrete part of himself in its memory. Indeed, Luzhin is so remote that the reader will often wonder what a concrete part of himself might look like in the first place. Discovering chess is the central event of his life, and losing it his central tragedy. There are some astonishing characters here: Luzhin's wife, who cannot hold onto her elusive husband any more than she might catch an ocean wave in her outstretched arms; his wife's parents, who have made Russia into a caricature of itself, trapped in a bowl of beet soup and served up to the strains of balalaikas; the sinister Valentinov, the real grandmaster of Luzhin's psyche, who moves his pawn on an immense emotional chessboard, the distant reaches of which even the novel itself would not seem to contain. "The Defense" is an exciting tour de force. It will stretch any reader's imagination into utterly uncharted territory. Nabokov's language is, as always, crisp and clear as a blue December morning. His worlds, spinning through the literary cosmos, are like nothing glimpsed through any telescope before.

V. Nabokov was a genius who wrote like an angel (but he was aware of both traits). I'm always impressed with his playful and total command of English, slang and all. This novel, about a chess genius, is one of his earliest. I'll happily turn to all the rest, having previously read only "Lolita" and "Pnin."

Luzhin, the hapless grandmaster born before World War I, has no inner life. He hides from people on all social occasions, dresses in rags, and lives a reclusive existence until an unnamed Russian expatriate in Paris takes pity on him and marries him over her parents' objections. The modern reader naturally thinks of Bobby Fischer with his antisocial behavior and tantrums, but Luzhin is more tortured, and actually has a psychotic break at the point of adjournment of his world championship match with an Italian challenger who favored hypermodern flank openings (perhaps modeled after Richard Reti, another player of the 1920s whose achievements were cut short by an early death).

Nabokov not only played chess, but composed "retrograde" problems of the most difficult kind, in which the solution requires proof of the move that must have preceded the position shown in the diagram. His description of Luzhin's hallucinations is harrowing, but his shimmering vocabulary and sentence structure puts him at the top of his craft as a writer. One of the most remarkable things about Nabokov was his brilliant, penetrating, power of observation. A few examples:

"That special snow of oblivion, abundant and soundless snow, covered his recollection with an opaque white mist."

"...and his wife's voice persuading the silence to drink a cup of cocoa."

"He became engrossed in the fantastical misbehavior of numbers and the wayward frolics of geometric lines....He lingered long in those heavens where earthly lines go out of their mind."

"[Chess] combinations [are] like melodies. You know, I simply hear the moves."

"The urns that stood on the stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals."

"Maples were casting their lively shade."

"The typewriter, whose keys were all watching him with their pupils of reflected light..."

"A half-opened drawer from which, snake-like, a green red-spotted tie came crawling."

"The modern urge to set senseless records..."

"Not once did he attempt to support a collapsing conversation."

"He looked at the moon, which was tremblingly disengaging itself from some black foliage."

"A village girl was eating an apple and her black shadow on the fence was eating a slightly larger apple."

[Champagne bottle] "A bucket with a gold-knobbed glass Pawn sticking out of it."

"The tailor jabbed pins into him, which he took with astonishing deftness from his mouth, where they seemed to grow naturally."

"A burst of military music approached in orange waves."

"A bookcase crowned with a broad-shouldered, sharp-faced Dante in a bathing cap."

"A candle whose flame darted about, maddened at being carried out of the warm church into the unknown darkness, and finally died of a heart attack at the corner of the street where a gust of wind bore down from the Neva."

"Chairs moved with the sounds of throats being cleared.

"[As the cab moved] the soft shadow made by his nose circled slowly over his cheek and then his lip, and again it was dark until another light went by."

"In the entrance hall hung a condemned jacket."

"Attendants were accepting things and carrying them away like sleeping children."

"Someone closed the door so the music would not catch cold."

"The helpless mercury, under the influence of its surroundings, fell ever lower and lower."

"The bedroom was adorned by a bas-relief done in charcoal and a confidential conversation

between a cone and a pyramid."

"The most unexpected places were invaded in the mornings by the snout of the rapacious vacuum cleaner. It is difficult, difficult to hide a thing: the other things are jealous and do not allow a homeless object escaping pursuit, into a single cranny."

An amazing masterpiece.

It is unfair but perhaps inevitable that a writer's minor works should forever labour in the shadows of their more successful siblings. Had The Defense been Nabokov's only novel, I believe Nabokov would have been greatly respected, if not celebrated, for his achievement. As it is, we must now see this story as an imperfect expression of the astonishing vision that only found true realisation in Lolita, Pale Fire and Pnin. In those works Nabokov perfected the art of seeing man as simultaneously comic and tragic - sublime and menacing. The Defense, which tells the story of a Russian Grand Master unable truly to understand anything other than the game of chess, provides an early inkling of this vision, but does not bring it wholly to life. Luzhin, our hero, whilst at times effectively comic and at others compellingly tragic, is too often a remote, incomprehensible figure - almost a freak - to sustain the reader's ongoing interest. Indeed there is something cold and controlled about the entire book; it recalls a classical tragedy in its remorseless, inevitable design. What is lacking is a sense of the unpredictable and the giddy - to name just two qualities that Nabokov, in his later American novels, became unrivalled at capturing. Nowadays, I suppose, only those with a genuine passion for Nabokov will find the book an ultimately satisfying read.