3.5* Ο Ναμπόκοφ ήταν μια μεγαλοφυΐα, αλλά κι εκείνος ξεκίνησε από κάπου, βελτιώθηκε κάπου και κατέληξε στην γνωστή σε όλους αποθέωση. Η ανάγνωση κάθε βιβλίου του απαιτεί συγκέντρωση, εκτίμηση για τις συνθέτες εικόνες που προσφέρει, εσωτερικές και μη, και αγάπη. Παρόλα αυτά, δεν βρίσκουν όλα στόχο και ο Λουζιν, μια γνώριμα παρουσιασμενη φιγούρα, είναι καθόλα βαρετός, μονοκομματος, και απλά ψυχωτικός. Η γραφή του Ναμπόκοφ ακόμα ψάχνεται, παρόλο που υπάρχουν κομμάτια και εκφράσεις που ελάχιστοι συγγραφείς έχουν καταφέρει να γράψουν σε όλη τους την ζωή.
Δεν είναι Πνιν, και φυσικά ούτε κατά διάνοια (δεν πλησιάζει καν) Λολιτα. Είναι βέβαια Ναμπόκοφ, και τις περισσότερες φορές αυτό αρκεί. Απλά, δεν ήταν κάτι παραπάνω. Έχουν γραφτεί -και εδώ- τόσοι διθύραμβοι και τόσες εκτενείς περιγραφές που είμαι μάλλον party pooper αλλά παίζει ρόλο η στιγμή, η περίοδος και οι απαιτήσεις.
Κάτι λιγότερο από 4* για μένα.

Writers and poets seem to agree on chess leading down the path of insanity. What is meant to be fun is clearly too easy to obsess over, particularly in the hands of a witty and dramatic writer such as Nabokov.



The Luzhin Defense tells the story of poor Luzhin, a boy who doesn't seem to live up to his parents' expectations. Instead of facing these struggles, he turns to chess: a game brining him comfort and turns out he's also really good at it. While soon internationally famous, the people around him realise that diving into the depths of chess won't really help him overcome his childhood trauma.

What makes this particularly hard-hitting is that it's so understandable. Young Luzhin is a distracted boy who doesn't seem to fit in. Isolated from his peers and unloved by his parents, discovering chess for him means solace. On those sixty-four squares life seems predictable and controllable. Naturally he'd cling onto what seems to give his life meaning, but we then have to watch bis passion become an obsession as he grows older. Life throws different responsibilities at adults than it does at children, and fighting the process of growing up becomes increasingly harder.

There's something about Nabokov's writing that makes everything feel dreamy and beautiful. Even when he's writing about madness that is! The tone is more serious than in his later works and instead we get long, dense paragraphs that draw us into Luzhin's world of illusion. The words feel both cold and feverish, unreal and utterly true at the same time. Knowing that the story was based on Curt von Bardeleben, whom Nabokov was personally acquainted adds a different flavour to this as well. I'm honestly so glad that there's still so much of this man's work that I am yet to explore.

شاید در تکرار، آسودگی رو می طلبیم... برای نگه داشتن خیال باطل نوعی کنترل.
انگار یا باید تکرار رو نادیده گرفت، یا باید پذیرفت.

شاید در نیستی هم گریزی از تکرار نیست... فقط فراموشیه و خاموشی

The story of love ; not the conventional human love , but the love of the obsession , the obsession for the chess , resolving the problems through the analytics , rationalization and deduction. A story about a loner boy that discovers chess ; negating the reality and indifferent to everything and everyone , the loner boy named Luzhin immersed in the intellectual abyss of this analytical game ; his obsession brings him to champions titles and his games are considered immortal and aesthetically magnificent. But this obsession brings the insanity in the pedestal , the game with a more positional combinations then the atoms in the human body is a vanitious creature with a child face and smile. Luzhin's sanity is an illusion , but a pillar for Luzhin's rationalization and deduction during the games. He can only function playing chess, in this closed system , the reality of the chess game is in his hands [brain's calculations] , but the objective reality is a peculiar obscure nightmare . Luzhin cannot distinct reality from illusion , and after a championship game against another chess genius grandmaster , he is hit by a psychological collapse. The doctors say no more chess.
Can Luzhin survive without chess, because chess can kill him ? Reasoning about chess , he will die ; living without chess , he will die either. He's a dead man walking anyway.
Can you survive without the things that help you to create yourself , emotionally , socially , intellectually ?
Is worth living without this things ?
Without your notorious and peculiar characteristics that distinct you from the herd ?
As the title ''the Luzhin defense'' refers primary as a chess defense invented by the same main character [Nabokov's words] , the metaphorical interpretations of the title is the main concept of Luzhin's obsession , emotions , love for chess , enjoyment till the breakdown. Luzhin must defend this virtues against himself and themselves , for him and themselves. An emotional paradox , is a one way street , you're your own enemy. You know everything about the opponent, every move , every provocation , every vice.
Playing chess against a mirror is an intellectual nightmare , but playing for life against the mirror is a transcendental violation of the brain.

Στην Άμυνα του Λούζιν (1929), έχουμε να κάνουμε με ένα πολύ διαφορετικό κείμενο σε σχέση με την πολυδιαβασμένη Σκακιστική Νουβέλα του Zweig . Πρόκειται για την πλήρη βιογραφία ενός ιδιοφυούς σκακιστή από τα παιδικά του χρόνια και τις πρώτες του σκακιστικές αναμνήσεις μέχρι τον θάνατό του, ενός ανθρώπου παντελώς απροσάρμοστου κοινωνικά, που κατρακυλά στην άβυσσο, και αποθεραπεύεται, και ξανά κατρακυλά, αφού πλέον συνειδητοποιεί ότι καμιά άμυνα δεν είναι ικανή να τον βοηθήσει να αντιμετωπίσει τον μέγιστο αντίπαλό του, την εμμονή του για το σκάκι. Αν ο Zweig προσπαθεί να ισορροπήσει μεταξύ ψυχολογικού και πολιτικού, ο Nabokov αγκιστρώνεται και μελετά ΕΞΟΝΥΧΙΣΤΙΚΑ το θέμα της σχέσης ΙΔΙΟΦΥΙΑ και ΨΥΧΑΣΘΕΝΕΙΑ.
Μαέστρος στην περιγραφή της ψυχοσύνθεσης του ήρωα που παλεύει, αλλά αποτυγχάνει να αναπτύξει την Άμυνα εκείνη που θα τον προστατεύσει από την εμμονή του, διαθέτει, κατά τη γνώμη μου κι ένα άλλο μέγιστο προσόν: τη λεπταίσθητη ειρωνεία που συχνά μετατρέπει την τραγωδία του ηττημένου ήρωα σε κωμωδία. Η σκηνή της πρώτης νύχτας του γάμου ή το επεισόδιο με τη γραφομηχανή, νομίζω θα τα θυμάμαι για χρόνια!!!!

It's been a while since a novel that I like a lot, and stick through to the end, leaves me feeling so baffled. I was bewildered by the character of Luzhin throughout my reading experience; only after finishing the novel and thinking about it, do I think I can arrive at some sense of what happened. At first blush, Nabokov portrays him as a harmless and pathetic man child throughout the book; and yet he is also a genius at chess, which in his wife's eyes is something precious and to be regarded as elevating him. At the end he does something which shows that his the harmless and pathetic facets of his character might properly stem from something deeper, an all consuming obsession for winning chess games. Moreover, the novel leaves me baffled over exactly what this obsession amounts to for Luzhin. He does not seem to be obsessed with the literal game of chess itself, but it also does not extend to metaphorical extensions of this game to real life that culture at large might generally make (as I will summarize a bit below). Rather, this obsession seems to be fundamentally a primitive, formal (e.g., abstracted or independent of particular situations) desire to be detached from the human world, and to have one's psyche consumed by a strategic or analytical type of thought (I'll elaborate on this below).

Nabokov's gives us a juxtaposition between Luzhin and his former teacher Valentinov, to show how the game of chess can mean different things for different people - the same literal object of obsession can amount to wholly distinct obsessions. Both men seem incapable of valuing certain things that we typically take to be central to a normal or healthy human life, namely loving human relationships, taking up responsibilities to protect and care for others, and the like. But they are nevertheless very different men. Valentinov is manipulative and dangerously psychopathic. It seems that he takes his practice of chess to be a schema for arranging his life, and putting the people he encounters "to play" in the "games" he conceives of, for his personal benefit (or, he already more broadly has these dispositions, and playing chess is just one domain under which he exercises those). In contrast, Luzhin is practically harmless. He is obsessed with chess itself, seemingly just its formal aspects. He is addicted to imagining forth all the possible game plays and being immersed in the play. His capacities for playing chess are localized to just this game.

Luzhin's only application of the metaphor of chess to his life more broadly (to avoid spoilers) reveals his neighboring, implicit beliefs that he is under attack by forces from outside, and that winning does not involve taking down any agent standing for or behind those forces, but rather beating that agent in a formally strategic sense, a sense that doesn't involve action and manipulation of the social-physical world -- but instead, it involves predicting what that agent wants, what he will do next, and doing whatever that would undermine the conditions that would be necessary for their following through with their next move. I am still at a loss of figuring out exactly how to put this into words, to describe what the chess obsession amounts to for Luzhin. This obsession at least also in effect takes him out and away from the human world; he does not have to feel the emotions of or take up the first-person perspective of anybody. He can be almost machine-like (which in effect looks more like being totally naive, helpless, or pathetic) - but he achieves this to a degree that is terrifying, that exerts so much power over the people around him (but only due to their projecting or putting extraordinary value on what they perceive his character and abilities to be).

I was also quite moved by Luzhin's wife Katkov. She desires to marry Luzhin because she sees his mastery at chess as something otherwordly, as marking him out as a more dignified and miraculous being than any other man she will meet. But once they marry, we quickly see how she essentially adopts the role of a mother to Luzhin. There is no passion in their relationship. Luzhin is incapable of loving and caring for her. But she seems to not be bothered by this. She takes a certain pleasure even in being his mother-like caretaker. Nabokov does not give the reader much for making sense of why Katkov is so comfortable with this position. A guess would be that she identifies Luzhin's genius as something that she, through some irrationally believed law of transitivity, herself possesses, by virtue of being his wife. And/or, she has an irrational belief that by identifying with Luzhin, she can be freed from the messy human world of social drama and values, that he can take her to some transcendental place. That is evidently not the outcome; she heightens the drama around her by devoting herself to Luzhin; this upsets her family, and she loses her interests and vitality, as it all gets sacrificed for the singular task of protecting Luzhin from the broader human world.

Nabokov is as funny, witty, emotionally precise as always; and likewise his prose is as poetic, surprising, and beautiful as always. Moreover, he does what I perhaps admire most about his novels: his characters would, if found in any other artwork or in the real world, be portrayed as positively pathological or crazy. But Nabokov treats them with much care and detail, as if he were exploring the character and possibilities of any ordinary person.

Over the last few weeks I’ve read The Luzhin Defense, followed by Bluebeard and then Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Originally I was going to write some stuff here about the central characters and compare them with the original Outsider. I was going to say things like this:

Maybe it is a contradiction in terms, to put 3 books about outsiders in the same review, but I can’t stop myself.

We have here a chess player, a doctor who might or might not have murdered a wife and a chickenhead. They all share a trait lacking in the original Outsider: they are all able to induce a sympathetic response from the reader. I don’t believe we have any capacity to understand Camus’s Outsider and without that, how can we have sympathy? It is easy to empathise with the others, however apart they may be from our own lives. It is impossible for Camus to put us in the shoes of his Outsider. It IS possible to become the crazy chess player, the murderous doctor, the mentally deficient chickenhead. Indeed it is Dick’s great strength that his characters slip into you; no matter that they are hypothetical consequences of a hypothetical world.

I can’t help wondering how I would have felt about Nabokov if I’d read him last instead of first. I thought he was getting away with being clever and ornate at the time. But to read the spare prose of Frisch next made me question this. And sharing with Dick the suffering of his characters meant I started wondering if Nabokov really had a clue what he was writing about. He says things that hit the mark for sure and his general thesis that chess saves the hero’s life until his dogooder wife-to-be starts interfering is completely faithful to the real world. I would scarcely be the only chess player to associate with Luzhin’s discovery of the game, a discovery that means life is suddenly tolerable. But something makes me distrust Nabokov’s potrayal of the Outsider, and I’m tired of trying to figure out what it is.

That’s the sort of thing I was going to say.

But I’d rather read. Consider me a goodreads outsider.

Αριστούργημα!!!!
Ένας μεγάλος Μαιτρ ο Nabokov, ξεδιπλώνει αργά και μεθοδικά το ταλέντο του... Σαν να παρακολουθείς έναν σπουδαίο μαέστρο να διευθύνει μια ορχήστρα... Συγκινητικός!!!

El ajedrez siempre ha tenido ese componente casi mágico para mí, como cuando admirado observo a un músico callejero tocando cualquier instrumento musical. Inmediatamente me cautiva. Al igual que Nabokov me ha cautivado por completo con esta novela.

En "La Defensa" Nabokov presenta a Luzhin, un joven inadaptado aunque muy especial, carente de habilidades sociales y con un absoluto desinterés por relacionarse con el resto de la sociedad que descubre en el ajedrez una razón para vivir.

Al descubrir el ajedrez su mundo empieza a tomar forma. Cuando el padre se da cuenta de ello se dirá “no solo se divierte con el ajedrez, sino que parece celebrar un rito sagrado”. Y es que Luzhin, “no contemplaba las talladas crines de los caballos ni las cabezas brillantes de los peones, pero sentía con toda claridad que esta o aquella casilla imaginaria estaba ocupada por una fuerza definida y concentrada, de modo que le era posible concebir el movimiento de una pieza como una descarga, una sacudida o el fulgor de un relámpago, y el tablero entero de ajedrez se imantaba de tensión, y sobre esta tensión él ejercía un dominio total, concentrando aquí y liberando allá toda la energía eléctrica, el cansancio físico no era nada en comparación con la fatiga mental que era su premio por el intenso esfuerzo y el éxtasis implícito en el juego mismo, que él dirigía desde una dimensión celestial en la que sus instrumentos eran cantidades incorpóreas”... Extraordinaria, maravillosa descripción que muy pocos pueden escribir, un genio como Nabokov SÍ.

La entrega por el juego y todas sus posibilidades acaba convirtiéndose en una obsesión y Luzhin “aceptaba la vida exterior como algo inevitable, pero ni mucho menos interesante”, toda su vida estaba en esas 64 casillas negras y blancas. Su obsesión termina por descontrolarse con la muerte de su padre, y, a raíz de ese acontecimiento, nuestro protagonista “se sumergió con melancólica pasión en nuevos cálculos, inventó combinaciones y vagamente comenzó a intuir la clase de defensa que le era necesaria: una defensa deslumbrante”. En este momento Nabokov empieza a diluir la delgada línea que separa la realidad del juego, y esa defensa ajedrecística se puede entender también como una defensa psicológica, vital, de supervivencia, el escudo que crea Luzhin ante ese mundo neblinoso que le rodea. Llegará a ser un gran maestro. Llegará a la cúspide del ajedrez. Y en su partida cumbre… será devorado por sí mismo y por un movimiento inesperado de su oponente. Ese momento es también el zénit de la novela, Nabokov vuelve a deslumbrarnos con su genio y su ritmo literario: la partida decisiva con el gran maestro Turati, rival de Luzhin. Aquí Nabokov convierte al ajedrez en un elemento poético, sublime, rozando la perfección. Dos mentes brillantes. Dos concepciones de ser y estar. Dos universos.

A partir de ahí la vida de Luzhin cae sin remedio a los infiernos. Así como la lectura comienza a tornarse más contenida, taciturna, lúgubre, gris. La locura que viene después de la obsesión absorbe la historia y el lector baja a los infiernos en los que Luzhin se mantiene con vida, diría que casi sin pulso, a merced de los cuidados de su esposa, pero sin un motivo para sonreír. Esta decadencia alcanza sus cotas más altas con alucinaciones, como los "mensajes ocultos" en los periódicos. Luzhin empieza a ver como su vida tras el ajedrez es una repetición de su miserable vida antes del ajedrez, “con vaga admiración y vago horror observó cuán pasmosamente, con qué elegancia y flexibilidad, jugada tras jugada, se habían repetido las imágenes de su infancia, pero no lograba comprender por qué esa repetición le inspiraba tanto temor a su alma”. A partir de este momento “no habría descanso para él; debía, si era posible, idear una defensa contra esa pérfida combinación, liberarse de ella y para ello tenía que prever un objetivo final, una dirección definitiva, lo que aún no parecía posible hacer. Y era tan alarmante la idea de que la repetición probablemente continuara, que sintió la necesidad de detener el reloj de su vida, suspender para siempre la partida, permanecer inmóvil, y al mismo tiempo se dio cuenta de que continuaba existiendo, que una especie de preparativos se habían puesto en marcha, un desarrollo furtivo, y que él no tenía poder para detener ese movimiento”. El destino como contrincante en la partida de ajedrez que era su vida.

"La Defensa" desde mi punto de vista es una novela extremadamente bien pensada, muy detallada, la cual posee una cantidad de elementos que le dan una belleza estética a la patética vida de nuestro protagonista. Y ante esto uno se pregunta ¿Cómo puede ser bello lo patético? ¿Cómo se logra eso? La respuesta para mí es mediante la manera única que tiene Nabokov de escribir, en la que sus textos buscan el arte, el placer estético y no tan sólo una narración entretenida.

Al terminar de leer el libro no sabes si la locura de Luzhin es real o infundida. Es la maestría de Nabokov para profundizar en la mente de sus personajes y retorcerlos implacablemente la que brilla en toda la novela.

Para mi Nabokov es un escritor muy especial, y adoro sus novelas ya que la forma que tiene de apreciar la literatura como un arte es lo que él mismo plantea en sus escritos. Absolutamente todo lo que narra tiene una unión, una conjunción que da como resultado el florecimiento de sentimientos, unos sentimientos que construyen la atmósfera que busca con sus descripciones, cada trazo que escribe, cada elemento está ahí por algún motivo, para completar un cuadro y así integrar completamente al personaje en la ficción que está creando.

Así, desde mi punto de vista, Nabokov crea una novela perfecta.

Of the three Russian-original Nabokovs I've read, I got the most sheer enjoyment out of The Luzhin Defense. There's none of the Kafka fetish of Invitation to a Beheading, none of the awkward translation failures I experienced with Despair, there's just a story of a chess prodigy who really, really should be anything other than a chess prodigy. And it's all told in this sighing, summers-by-Lake-Como early 20th Century European voice that I'm an absolute sucker for (hell, as I type this, I'm sipping a glass of dry sherry with blackcurrant syrup and a soupcon of Campari).

Sin duda una de las mejores novelas que he leído de Nabokov, muy superior a su Lolita. La defensa fue un libro hipnotizante desde el comienzo, imposible de soltar. Nos narra la vida desde la infancia hasta la adultez de Luzhin, un prodigioso del ajedrez. Este hombre es un ser muy especial, que desde temprana edad mostró una completa falta de habilidades sociales, un absoluto desinterés por relacionarse con los demás e integrarse a la sociedad. Su nula capacidad para enfrentarse al mundo exterior terminó desarrollando su mundo interno, prefiriendo hábitos como la lectura y una completa obsesión por el ajedrez. Esta habilidad extraordinaria para jugar a este juego de mesa es solo un síntoma secundario de su eterna lucha contra la realidad. Es una forma de escape, que termina afectando severamente su mente, la cual no puede dejar de ver el mundo como si se tratara de una partida de ajedrez, una eterna partida contra la vida.
El desarrollo psicológico del personaje es muy detallado y la narración casi sin diálogos que lo acompaña lo transforma en una verdadera experiencia de vida para el lector. Es una novela extremadamente bien pensada, llena de detalles que le dan una belleza estética a la patética vida de Luzhin.

Nabokov's 3rd novel, inspired, according to him, while collecting butterflies in the Pyrenees in 1929. That's notable because he's a little famous for the hobby and also because it's not a Great Depression novel, but was mostly written before that happened (in Wiemar Berlin).

The story is about Alexsandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a Russian child Chess savant who has grown up. He's still famous, a masterful player appreciated most by those who know the game. But he also hasn't matured. Helpless, unhealthy, unkempt, unaware, driven in his obsession but otherwise harmless, there is a pathetic likable aspect to him. His fame and harmlessness attract a wife to him, a soft-hearted sympathetic Russian exile like himself who commits herself to his care. It works out OK until Luzhin begins to see the world more and more like a Chess board, and those around him more an more like players to outmaneuver. Readers will notice playful imagery with squares everywhere.

It's also, IMO, a very limited novel. Playing interesting games, no doubt, but a little tiresome between its highlights, well to me at least. I just didn't love how its structured, how artificial and clean the construction is. It felt to me like there was some distance between it and the author and I didn't care for that. Maybe "impersonal" is the right word. (I much prefer Mary, his more personal 1st novel). Anyway, I felt it dragged in places.

Overall, I liked the characters, I like the view of Russian exiles (and of one Soviet patriot on a shopping spree!!) in this era, and I liked the ideas, but didn't love the book. I wouldn't recommend it. (Chess enthusiasts may feel a need to overrule me.)

(As I was writing this review, I stumbled a cross a movie based on the book, released in 2000. It's a romantic drama.)

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20. The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
translation: from Russian, by Michael Scammell, with the author, 1963
published: 1930
format: 256-page paperback
acquired: December
read: Apr 8-18
time reading: 8 hr 8 min, 1.9 min/page
rating: 3
locations: pre-revolution St. Petersburg area, and contemporary 1920's Berlin, mainly
about the author April 22 1899 – July 2 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922, later lived in Berlin (1922-1937), the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).