Η επαφή μου με το σκάκι είναι ανύπαρκτη, κυρίως διότι δεν διαθέτω το ενδιαφέρον και -εν τέλει- την απαιτούμενη ευφυία. Ως εκ τούτου, ακόμα και η λογοτεχνική του επικάλυψη με αφήνει καταρχάς ουδέτερο και δευτερευόντως καχύποπτο απέναντι στο εγχείρημα.
Πιστός όμως στο αξίωμα του "ΠΩΣ γράφεις και όχι στο ΤΙ γράφεις", παραμερίζω τις ενστάσεις περί περιεχομένου, και επικεντρώνομαι στην ουσία, δηλαδή στο ύφος. Η πρώτη μου επαφή μάλλον δεν ανέτρεψε την άποψη μου. Η περίφημη "Σκακιστική Νουβέλα" του Stefan Zweig υπήρξε βιβλίο ενδιαφέρον και καλογραμμένο, δίχως όμως να μου προξενήσει το απαραίτητο δέος, κάτι που οφείλεται σαφώς στον συγγραφέα: Ικανός γραφιάς, αλλά τίποτε πέραν αυτού - σαφώς υπερεκτιμημένος, κατά την άποψή μου.
Το αυτό δεν ισχύει για τον Nabokov, συγγραφέα τεραστίου βεληνεκούς που ως άλλος Μίδας αγγίζει με την πένα του το έλασσον και το μετατρέπει σε μείζον! Πόσω μάλλον όταν το αντικείμενό του είναι το λεγόμενο "Παιχνίδι των Βασιλέων", στου οποίου τη γοητεία -γνωρίζουμε- τακτικά υπέκυπτε και ο ίδιος.
"Η άμυνα του Λούζιν" δεν καταφεύγει στην ευκολία της περιγραφής περίπλοκων παρτίδων, σκακιστικών συλλογισμών και ψυχολογικής έντασης, ώστε να προ(σ)καλέσει το ενδιαφέρον του αναγνώστη. Τουναντίον, οι σκακιστικές διελκυστίνδες αποτελούν αφορμή για ανάλυση και ανελέητη ενδοσκόπηση του χαρακτήρα του Λούζιν. Ενός αλλοτριωμένου χαρακτήρα, έρμαιου της σκακιστικής του δεινότητας, τυφλού απέναντι στη ζωή και στις υποχρεώσεις της, αλλά και απόλυτα ξένου προς οποιοδήποτε ζωντανό ον επιχειρεί να τον προσεγγίσει.
Και ο Λούζιν αμύνεται σθεναρά ενάντια στον εαυτό του, ενάντια στο πάθος που τον κατακλύζει, καθώς η ζωή του μετατρέπεται σταδιακά σε μια τρομακτική αλληλουχία ασπρόμαυρων σκακιστικών τετραγώνων. Σε μια δίνη που ανελέητα τον ρουφά εντός της, δίχως έρμα για να αντισταθεί. Τίποτα και κανείς δεν μπορεί να τον σώσει από τον εαυτό του, καθώς τα φράγματα της λογικής υποχωρούν ένα-ένα. Ο Λούζιν επιχειρεί μάταια να στήσει την τελευταία του "Άμυνα" όσο ο κόσμος του αποσυντίθεται ανεξίτηλα γύρω του.
Πιόνι και ο ίδιος, καταλήγει αναπόδραστα στη μοναδική κίνηση που του απέμεινε: Να θέσει εαυτόν εκτός σκακιέρας. Και η τελευταία κίνηση ελευθερίας του, θα είναι τελικά εκείνη που θα του προσφέρει μια μικρή, ασήμαντη ανταμοιβή. Επιτέλους, ο Λούζιν (επώνυμο) θα αποκτήσει Όνομα (άγνωστο σε εμάς ως την τελευταία γραμμή), τη στιγμή ακριβώς που η αυλαία θα πέσει και ο δύστηνος ήρωας θα επιστρέψει δια παντός στο "κουτί της ανυπαρξίας".

ne trebaš biti ljubitelj šaha da bi uživao u ovoj izbrušenoj priči o lužinu tokom njegovog cijelog života. makar na samo dvjestotinjak stranica, nabokov je stručno, kroz duboki, ali nepretenciozni psihološki prikaz ispisao život "čudaka" lužina, šahovskog genijalca koji se teško snalazi u ovom svijetu (kako to već biva...).
majstorsko djelo, stilski dotjerano, za polako čitanje: čista klasika.

Nabokov càng ác với nhân vật thì càng thấy thương Nabokov quá. Và thương mình nữa. Một bi kịch mà những người trong cùng tình cảnh mới hiểu.

از نظر خودم رمان خاص و نابی و بود و از انجا که به ادبیات روسیه علاقمند بودم خواندن این کتاب شدیدا لذت بخش بود. پیچیدگی های خاصی داشت. توصیف فوق العاده که زیرکی تمام درش به کار رفته بود. زندگی لوژین سرشار بود از الگو های تکراری. هر چند که در طول عمر سی ساله اش که سعی در فرار از این الگو ها داشت چندان موفق نبود. این اثر اثری تراژیک است و فرجام غم انگیزی دارد. مترجم به این نکته اشاره کرده است که زندگی لوژین در بعضی قسمت ها به زندگی کسانی مثل استاد بزرگ "روبینشتاین"،"کورت فون باردلبن" (استاد برلینی) و آلخین (قهرمان شطرنج جهان در دهه های 30 و 40 شباهت داشت.
زندگی لوژین از آغاز تا پایان شباهتی عجیب به دنیای شطرنج داشت. دفاع لوژین دربرابر تمام حقارت ها،کاستی ها،یک نواختی ها و سردرگمی ها وافعا دردناک بود. به نظر من شاید تنها راه فرار او از زندگی واقعی اش پناه بردن به دنیای شطرنج بود با یک آیرونیه دردناک که این دلیل فرجام تلخ زندگی او شد.
واقعا از خواندن این رمان لذت بردم و سعی کردم با حوصله وقت بگذارم و حتی از یک جمله به راحتی نگذرم. ترجمه ی فوق العاده ای داشت و حق مطلب را به خوبی ادا کرد. (ترجمه از رضا رصایی)
قسمت پایانی و مورد علاقه ی من:
قبل از رها کردن خودش، به پایین نگاه کرد. آن جا تدارک عجولانه ای در جریان بود:انعکاس پنجره هاجمع شد و هم سطح شد،تمامی آن ورطه انگار به مربع های تیره و روشن تقسیم شد،و لحظه ای که لوژین دستش را رها کرد،لحظه ای که هوای یخ زده به دهانش حجوم بر، دقیقا دید که چه نوع ابدیتی به اجبار و بی رحمانه در برابرش گسترده می شود...

به توصیه رفیقی کتاب را خواندم،داستانی پرکشش و مملو از جزییات ظریف که گویای تسلط نویسنده در خلق دنیای پیچیده ذهنی و پیرامونی نقش اول رمانه.استفاده از المانهای شطرنج در پیشبرد روند و توصیف موقعیتهای داستان جالبه.درکل خواندنی و قابل تامله،با ترجمه سلیس و درخور.

If Nabokov's second novel reminded me of one of my favorite writers—Marcel Proust—his third, The Luzhin Defense, brings to mind another: Virginia Woolf. Given that The Luzhin Defense concerns the gradual mental disintegration of a Russian chess grandmaster, and given that Nabokov had apparently not yet read Woolf (when he did, in 1933, he claimed a low opinion of her work), its Woolfian overtones are a bit surprising. But consider this passage, in which the now-middle-aged Luzhin remembers how his asthmatic French governess used to get stuck in the family elevator:

Finally something would shudder and stir and after a little while the elevator would descend—now empty. Empty. Goodness knows what had happened to her—perhaps she had traveled up to heaven and remained there with her asthma, her liquorice candies and her pince-nez on a black cord. The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question—where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away?

Despite the asthma and the liquorice candies, I can hardly fail to think of Clarissa Dalloway here, remembering her days at Bourton, or Cam, in To the Lighthouse, looking back at the family house from the boat:

But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real: the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves—all this was real.

Even the inter-leaved sentence structure with its many comma-delineated phrases, that repeated "whither" and the reiterated "Empty," are viscerally reminiscent of Woolf. So too is the way in which the physical objects of the past—Luzhin's veranda and bushes, Cam's life-knotted paths—are melded with the character's mental image of them, so that the mental image attains a tangible solidity whereas the objects are capable of disappearing or floating away, thought-like. The unreality of the past is stressed in both cases: both characters are substantially unable to access the memories they have left behind, even as those memories alter almost physically the reality in which they currently find themselves. Even as Luzhin acknowledges the gulf between himself and his childhood memories, for example, the image of the vacant elevator provides him with the very metaphor he uses to describe his mental state: "the recollection also came back empty."

Indeed, The Luzhin Defense, like much of Woolf's work, is preoccupied with the past and memory—specifically, in the case of Luzhin, with the effects on memory and perception of a concrete breaking-point in a character's personal history. Luzhin's boyhood is divided neatly into the aimlessly morose existence preceding his discovery of chess, and the single-minded, initially joyful obsession that follows it. In another instance of the mental and physical worlds bleeding into one anther, though, Luzhin's chess obsession becomes a burden as his perception of the world around him becomes ever-more dominated by chess imagery. Any dappling of light and shadow become, for him, a chess board; any arrangement of objects in relation to one another become a problem to be solved. As his perception of his actual tournament games becomes more vital—he sees the relation of pieces on the board during a game as a "thunderous harmony" that "breathe[s] with life"—the vitality of the the people and places around him, of his own past and any aspect of himself unrelated to the game, wanes. It eventually becomes so imperceptible that he can no longer sleep, feed himself, or find his way out of rooms.

After Luzhin's mental break, when he is encouraged by his doctors and fiancée not to think of chess any longer, he struggles to recover some version of himself independent of his obsession. He reverts to memories of himself before his discovery of chess, which although unhappy at the time, become a source of safety for the middle-aged man:

On the other hand, constantly nudged by such interrogations, his thoughts would return again and again to the sphere of his childhood. It was impossible to express his recollections in words—there simply were no grown-up words for his childish impressions—and if he ever related anything, then he did so jerkily and unwillingly—rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number. His pre-school, pre-chess childhood, which he had never thought about before, dismissing it with a slight shudder so as not to find dormant horrors and humiliating insults there, proved now to be an amazingly safe spot...

To make yet another possibly misguided comparison, Luzhin's story strikes me as akin to a religious conversion narrative of the type pioneered by Augustine of Hippo. In the Augustine model, there is a complete, definitive break between the outlook and personality of the narrator before religious conversion (or in Luzhin's case, before discovering chess), and the outlook and personality of that same person after conversion. Augustine's Confessions present a new convert who is changed utterly by inviting the Christian God into his heart. Once he has finally converted there is no more earthly struggle or strife; he is elevated into a spiritual realm. There's no possibility, for example, that the post-conversion Augustine might be tempted to back-slide into stealing pears or frequenting prostitutes; his conversion changes him utterly. Not only is he relieved of the temptations of his former life, but his perceptions of the events of that former life also change, so that he is looking back at them through the altering lens of his newfound Christian faith.n  1n

Similarly, Luzhin is altered completely with the discovery of chess, to the extent that his entire world comes to be composed of nothing but chess boards and chess pieces, and he exiles his pre-chess self almost completely from his consciousness. On those rare occasions when he thinks of it at all, he associates his non-chess past with "dormant horrors" and "humiliating insults": in other words, through a lens that privileges his current, chess-centric lifestyle as the thing that bestows value on his existence. Central questions of the latter half of the book, after Luzhin has been denied chess and attempts to reestablish some version of himself outside the game, are what happens when "salvation" becomes "damnation" (when the thing that bestowed value on one's life threatens to wipe out all meaning from that life), and whether Augustine was right about the irreversibility of a conversion. Quite apart from the question of whether or not a chess-less life could be compelling or worthwhile to him, is Luzhin even capable of converting back, once the fatal discovery has been made?

Let's just say that his attempt to talk about his childhood in chess-like terms, "rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number," does not bode well. What's more, it sheds new light on the hundred-plus pages of waffling that precedes Augustine's Christian epiphany. There can be dire consequences, in this model, for a misplaced or overly zealous conversion.

واااااای فوق العاده بود...
همه چیز این کتاب فوق العاده است..
بنظرم یک شاهکار ادبی را همین حالا تموم کردم.

ناباکوف انگار نشسته و با کافکا و فروید و بکت، شطرنج بازی میکنه. بارها فروید رو کیش میده و با بکت و کافکا مساوی میکنه.

نمیخوام که نقد ادبی و یا ساختاری بنویسم.. در آخر کتاب جناب آقای رضا رضایی،مترجم توانای کتاب، به خوبی این کتاب رو نقد کرده.
فقط میخوام جریان سیال احساستم رو در مورد این کتاب بیان کنم.حالا که چشمام رو می بندم و باز میکنم تمام اتاق و اطرافیانم رو مثل یک صفحه ی شطرنج میبینم که در توالی عبث زندگی روی قاعده هایی از پیش تعیین شده زندگی میکنن. و آخر هم نتیجه همان چیزی میشه که از اول بوده. همینطور که لوژین هزار بار بازی رو برد و مهره هارو از اول چیند... وقتی هم باخت بازهم مهره هارو دوباره از قبل میچید.. چقدر دسته و پنجه نرم کردن با این مهره ها ؟ درست مثل همون هام و کلاو در آخرین بازی اثر سموئل گودو که هر مسیری میرفتن طی یک تکراری رو به بی نهایت ادامه پیدا میکرد.
وقتی قدم به جهان ناباکوف میگذارم، دیگه نمیشه به این سادگی ها بیرون رفت.

ترجمه ی کتاب عالی ! جلد کتاب و طراحیش فوق العاده :)

Μια μυθιστορηματικοί βιογραφία του μεγάλου Ρώσου σκακιστή, άραγε; Του Αλιέχιν, δηλαδή ; Τι πιστεύετε εσείς;

A young boy, a loner, indifferent to everything, discovers chess. Ensnared by this insanely addictive game, he becomes even more indifferent to everything--except chess. He grows up, becomes a champion, many of his games considered "immortals." In a championship game against the equally-brilliant Italian Grandmaster Turati, upon adjourning a very difficult position, he suffers a breakdown. He survives, but the doctors opine that further chess might be fatal to him. Enough of the plot.

I have been looking for a copy of the film adaptation of this novel at my favorite video pirate shop. No luck so far. Would love to watch this on screen.It reportedly stars John Turturro (presumably as the chess genius Luzhin) and Emily Watson (as his wife). Nabokov's Luzhin is supposed to be short and fat, and his wife not that attractive. Emily Watson is lovely, Turturro is lean and tall. But Turturro has THAT look. Who directed this film? How did he do with the mad, but very tender scenes, between Luzhin and his wife? How did he illuminate Nabokov's brilliant chess metaphors, through Luzhin, who saw his life, from his childhood onwards, as a long chess combination, the fatal end to which he foresaw, desperately tried to find a way to avert, by defending, by countering the enemy's plans, by thwarting the attacks, with all the tenacity and strength he could muster? How to put on screen Nabokov's unparallelled characterizations? The jarring dialogues (especially Luzhin's few) with their admirable uniqueness and unpredictability (how did Nabokov conceive all these?)?

I read the last three pages of this novel standing up. I was about to leave already, for a meeting, but my feet were glued to the floor and my eyes to the book. The Luzhin Defense (sounds like a chess opening) was being played out. The conclusion was near. Tic, toc, went the chess clock, only seconds remaining...

All Nabokovs are good. This one is funny, but not an entry point to his oeuvre.

یکی از غمگین‌ترین و عجیب‌ترین چیزایی که این چند وقته خوندم.

Nearly five stars, nearly...

Those who know any obsessively compulsive persons will really appreciate the effort Nabokov went into for this. When you become so engrossed in your fixation that you begin to question what is reality. Of course I would never use this as a guide to dealing with loved ones who have OCD or whatever, but it was insightful into another aspect of the mind of the human. I have addictive tendencies, so perhaps I am lucky I never got into any activities like chess seriously. Of course I'd never have the skill to be professional regardless.

It's Nabokov, just read it.