The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

First published:Zashchita Luzhina, 1929, serial; 1930, book (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1910’s and 1920’s

Locale: Russia and Germany

Principal Characters:

• Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a world-class chess player
• Mrs. Luzhin, his fiancee and, later, his wife
• Mr. and Mrs. Luzhin, Sr., Luzhin’s parents
• Luzhin’s Aunt, a vivacious, redheaded young woman and the mistress of Luzhin, Sr.
• Valentinov, a chess promoter and, later, a film producer
• Turati, Luzhin’s chess opponent

The Novel

The Defense is the story of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a brilliant Russian chess master, who is locked in a losing chess game with madness and death. Having lost one match which ended in madness, he devises a special defense which proves ineffectual in his fatal rematch.

As the novel begins, Luzhin is a morose, solitary boy of ten, spending the last days of summer at the family’s country house near St. Petersburg. His father has just given him the unpleasant news that he is to start school upon their return to town. The boy loathes school. The only person for whom he feels any affection is his pretty young aunt, who proves to be his father’s mistress. She introduces little Luzhin to chess on the very day that his mother learns of the affair. The boy begins skipping school to visit his aunt’s apartment, where he plays chess against one of her admirers. The following summer, Luzhin, Sr., learns of his secretive son’s talent, and the prodigy makes his public debut. Dropping out of school, he devotes himself exclusively to chess until he falls ill. During his prolonged recuperation, he is taken to a German health resort where, by chance, a major international chess tournament is being held. Luzhin’s career is launched.

Sixteen years elapse in the course of a paragraph, and Luzhin is still at the same health resort, talking to a young woman who will become his wife. Socially, Luzhin at thirty has progressed little beyond the morose, taciturn boy of his childhood. During the intervening years, his youthful career has been managed by a Svengali-like chess promoter, Valentinov, who long since dropped his aging prodigy. Luzhin now faces a major tournament and has come to the resort to prepare himself. His bride-to-be is not put off by his eccentric, boorish behavior. After a bizarre courtship, he sets off for his tournament in Berlin, which is also the home of his fiancee’s dismayed parents.

Luzhin plays brilliantly, progressing toward a final match with an opponent named Turati, against whose novel opening move he has devised a new defense. (He has lost an earlier match to Turati.) In the evenings, Luzhin visits the kitschy home of his fiancee’s philistine parents. As the days pass, Luzhin, whose grasp of reality is faint at best, becomes ever more absorbed in the patterns of chess, which he imposes on his surroundings. The final match with Turati begins, but without the opening move against which Luzhin had devised his special defense. Luzhin is now so deeply sunk into the world of chess that he cannot regain the world of reality. When the game adjourns for the night, he hears a voice say “Go home.”

Luzhin awakes in a sanatorium attended by a black-bearded psychiatrist who, along with Luzhin’s fiancee, assures him that he must forswear chess if he is to save his sanity. Through a window, Luzhin observes a scene reminiscent of the Russian countryside and thinks, “Evidently, I got home.” Luzhin successfully suppresses his chess memories and re-creates his past starting from his prechess childhood. Soon released, he returns to Berlin, where he marries his fiancee. Luzhin’s new life without chess proceeds smoothly until he attends a charity ball. There, he encounters a dimly remembered childhood acquaintance who reminisces about their school days. Unaccountably distressed, Luzhin lies awake, pondering the secret meaning of the encounter. He resolves mentally to “replay all the moves of his life from his illness until the ball” in order to discover an unfolding pattern. The attentions of Luzhin’s wife are now distracted by the appearance of a guest, a childhood acquaintance who has arrived on a visit from Russia with her morose eight-year-old son, who is much like Luzhin. The woman knows the aunt who taught Luzhin to play chess. Shielded by his bride from all things that might remind him of chess, Luzhin chances to overhear the guest mention his aunt. He suddenly grasps the unfolding chess moves: “With vague admiration and vague horror he observed how awesomely, how elegantly and how flexibly, move by move, the images of his childhood had been repeated (country house...town...school...aunt), but still he did not quite understand why this combinational repetition inspired his soul with such dread.” Each stage of his life since the breakdown has repeated, in variant form, a stage of his childhood leading up to his discovery of chess which ended in his madness. Many other details are part of the repeating pattern. While his wife is preoccupied with her guest, everything seems to conspire to bring Luzhin back into the fatal world of chess. Each defensive move he makes is thwarted by an unseen opponent. At length, Valentinov, his old chess promoter, locates him with a proposal to act in a film together with his old foe Turati. Luzhin now realizes that he has lost. He chooses to resign the hopeless game by committing suicide.

The Characters

Vladimir Nabokov once referred to his characters as “galley slaves,” thus denying them the human credibility that realistic literary figures supposedly display. On the surface, Luzhin would seem to be an exception. Nabokov himself describes his lumpish, overweight, inarticulate hero as “uncouth, unwashed, uncomely—but...[with] something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius.” This contrast between the master of the beautifully elegant, abstract world of chess and the inept, doomed human being stirs the reader’s compassion. Nevertheless, Nabokov remains remote in the treatment of his protagonist. Luzhin acquires a first name and patronymic (the usual Russian form of address) only at the moment of his death. All the actions that give Luzhin’s character the illusion of humanity prove to be part of a developing novelistic chess pattern, not life. They are “moves” orchestrated from above.

Luzhin’s nameless wife, the novel’s only other sympathetic character, is his only link with human reality. Her love for the strange chess master is rooted in compassion rather than passion, but it is, nevertheless, real. For Luzhin, sex is obscurely linked with chess, perhaps because of his aunt’s sensuality and his wife’s quiet acquiescence in their asexual marriage. His wife tries only to protect Luzhin from his past, by building a normal, “chess-free” existence for him. Her valiant attempt is at first marginally successful—until her vigilance is distracted by the Russian guest, leaving Luzhin to his fatal obsession with chess.

Luzhin’s parents are little more than novelistic props to establish the stages in the boy’s life that will later be fatally repeated: country, town, school, aunt, and chess. It is the revelation of the father-aunt affair, coinciding with the boy’s introduction to chess, that underlies the sublimation of his sexuality (and entire existence) into chess. The parents are also a target of Nabokovian social satire. Luzhin’s father, a writer of saccharine children’s books, and his hypochondriacal mother present a mordant picture of Russian bourgeois high culture. This is contrasted with Luzhin’s true artistry as a chess player, which the father is completely unable to comprehend, as it does not fit the stereotypical image of the child prodigy. Strangely, it is the boy’s free-spirited aunt who senses his hidden talent and cultivates it with appropriate presents. The hero’s reluctant in-laws, a wealthy emigrant business family, are the chief objects of derision; their Berlin apartment is filled with nostalgic fake Russian gimcracks.

Valentinov, the entrepreneur who takes over the young Luzhin’s career, is a typically Nabokovian character type. He is the unscrupulous minor artist figure. A gifted man of many talents and a shrewd organizer, he coldly manipulates the lives of all whom he meets. Having launched Luzhin’s career as an international chess prodigy, he drops him. Valentinov returns only to deliver the coup de grace, inveigling Luzhin back into the world of chess as a bit player in a film he is producing. It is in his studio office that Luzhin finds the film magazine photo that gives him the idea for his suicide leap.

Critical Context

Nabokov was a gifted composer of chess problems as well as a brilliant writer. The Defense brings together the two passions, justifying his remark that both require “the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.” The Defense was Nabokov’s third novel and firmly established him as the most important of the younger generation of Russian emigre writers. He was controversial even then, however, for many considered his concern for formal elegance rather than social and spiritual truths to be counter to the tradition of Russian literature. This reaction became even more pronounced as Nabokov moved from the relative “realism” of The Defense to the highly sophisticated modernism of his later masterpieces, Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift. In 1940, the bilingual Nabokov started to write almost exclusively in English, with such works as Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), which brought him international acclaim. Banned in his homeland during his lifetime, Nabokov’s fiction at last took its place in Russian literature with the Soviet publication of The Defense in 1986.

Bibliography

Cockburn, Alexander. “Paths of Exile: Nabokov’s Grand Master,” in Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death, 1974.

Johnson, D. Barton. “Text and Pre-text in The Defense,” in Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1985.

Moody, Fred. “Nabokov’s Gambit,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly. XIV (1976), pp. 67-70.

Purdy, Strother B. “Solus Rex: Nabokov and the Chess Novel,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XIV (Winter, 1968-1969), pp. 379-395.

Updike, John. “Grandmaster Nabokov,” in Assorted Prose, 1965.