The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern [...]"

One must not expect every book by a great author to be a masterpiece yet somehow I feel disappointed having just read Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense, not that remarkable a novel, quite far from the greatness of Lolita or excellence of Speak, Memory . The novel was written in Russian in 1929 and had to wait for an English edition until 1964.

The story begins with a little boy arriving with his parents at a train station: he is being sent to school and has just realized that he will now be called Luzhin, same as "the real Luzhin," his father. Withdrawn and aloof the boy is not able to adapt to school life: the teachers complain about his "lethargy, apathy, sleepiness and sluggishness." In fact none of these diagnoses are true. Luzhin just does not care at all about things that interest most people; instead he looks for patterns - elegant, harmonious patterns.

Accidentally he discovers chess and instantaneously becomes obsessed with it. Chess gives him the raw material to recognize, study, and process patterns in their purest simplicity. Quickly he becomes an expert chess player and his fame as a child chess prodigy explodes. He travels to many important cities in Europe to challenge the best chess masters and give simultaneous and blindfold play exhibitions. Finally he gets to play the champion, Turati. The account of this game is the narrative apex of the novel and foretells the further trajectory of events.

The other thread of the novel focuses on Luzhin's relationship with a woman who becomes strongly infatuated with his genius. And while I am entirely convinced by Nabokov's realistic portrait of Luzhin, I am not at all sold on the psychological characterization of the woman. Still, one might harbor a suspicion that Mr. Nabokov's lightness of literary brush was fully intended.

I am not as enraptured by the novel's prose, clearly not as superb as in Mr. Nabokov's best works. Perhaps the reason is that this novel was not translated from Russian by the author himself. On the other hand, the narrative structure of the novel, with its jumps and nonlinearities in time, is impressive. Readers familiar with Speak, Memory , the author's autobiography, will notice how the author "borrowed" certain people and items from his own life and fictionalized them in his novels. (We do not need to know whether the "borrowing" went in the other direction as well...)

As an ex-chess player I can vouch for complete realism of chess motifs. By the way, Mr. Nabokov was quite an accomplished composer of chess problems and studies.

Three stars.



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