The Gambit: Chess and the Art of Competition in The Luzhin Defense

The Gambit: Chess and the Art of Competition in The Luzhin Defense LUKE PARKER The future historian of émigré letters, looking through our newspapers and journals, will remark with a cheerful bitterness that the attacks on Sirin began at the very moment he made such a big step forward with The Luzhin Defense. Vladislav Khodasevich, 1938 Chess players have no biographies. Evgenii Znosko-Borovskii, 1927 H e was a former nobleman and student in prewar St. Petersburg, possessed of several languages and precocious artistic talent, and had lived as an émigré in Europe in the 1920s, steadily earning recognition and perfecting his craft. By the end of 1927 he was universally hailed as the young successor to the old masters of his art, had written acclaimed books in English, French, and German, and had just taken French citizenship (and a new francophone spelling of his surname). Celebrated by writers such as Boris Zaitsev and Alexander Kuprin as the justification of Russia Abroad, he would be remembered as one of the true greats of his generation. Russian chess grandmaster Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine’s success was unparalleled. The contrast with Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is striking. Even after the publication of King, Queen, Knave in 1928, he was little known outside Berlin, itself a rapidly shrinking enclave of Russian émigré culture.1 The newspaper Rul', which carried most of his works, was little read in Paris: when the influential poet Vladislav Khodasevich heard in 1928 of a favorable review of his Collected Verse by an unknown “V. Sirin,” he Gregory Freidin, Monika Greenleaf, and Gabriella Safran engaged with this work from its earliest stages. Completion of the article was made possible by a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Oberlin College. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at The Russian Review for their attention to both the ideas and the text of this piece. 1 V. Sirin, Korol', dama, valet (Berlin, 1928). The Russian Review 76 (July 2017): 436–55 Copyright 2017 The Russian Review parker.pmd 436 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 437 had to ask the critic Iulii Aikhenval'd to send him a copy from Berlin.2 Whereas Alekhine gave displays throughout South America and competed in New York, Nabokov was unable even to obtain a French work permit, and could not get hold of a carte d’identité for another decade.3 Seven years Alekhine’s junior, Nabokov had yet to make his mark. From 1927, Nabokov was preparing a move that would put him on the map of Russian letters: a novel serialized from 1929 to 1930 in Sovremennye zapiski, the most prestigious Russian émigré journal, based in Paris, the publishing capital of the emigration. This novel, The Luzhin Defense, takes as its protagonist a Russian émigré chess grandmaster, Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin, who shares with Nabokov and Alekhine his comfortable Russian childhood and his post-revolutionary exile.4 Nabokov’s choice of chess as the subject of his first Parisian novel was felicitous—and deliberate. 1927 was the year of Alekhine’s world championship victory, a sort of chess coronation, during which he was feted with banquets across Paris, was hailed by Zaitsev and Kuprin in the Paris daily Vozrozhdenie, and posed in Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia as the regal adjudicator at a mock game between prominent émigré politicians Pavel Miliukov and Petr Struve.5 In October, Nabokov published the poem “The Chess Knight” on this now ubiquitous émigré obsession, and in November he wrote a favorable review of the theater critic and chess player Evgenii ZnoskoBorovskii’s Capablanca and Alekhine: The Battle for World Supremacy (1927), previewing the forthcoming world championship in Buenos Aires.6 The international success of Alekhine brought into focus many of the questions debated in émigré literary circles about the possibility of creativity and mastery of one’s craft in the straitened circumstances of exile. Two days after his review of Capablanca and Alekhine, Nabokov published “Anniversary,” celebrating the ten-year anniversary of exile—an ironic counterpart to Soviet celebrations of the October Revolution. For this exilic jubilee he proclaimed “ten years of scorn, ten years of faithfulness, ten years of freedom.”7 Of this triad of anti-Sovietism, nostalgia for prerevolutionary Russia, and the embrace of an absence of censorship, it was the latter that proved most consequential for Nabokov’s involvement in the critical debates on émigré art. If, as one reviewer noted, a novel on chess could not but succeed in Russian Paris, Nabokov’s use of the game permitted his intervention into critical debates about the very nature of literary success in exile.8 2 Vladislav Khodasevich to Iu. I. Aikhenval'd, March 22, 1928, in Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. I. P. Andreeva et al. (Moscow, 1996), 4:508–9. 3 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990), 432, 492. 4 V. Sirin, “Zashchita Luzhina,” Sovremennye zapiski 40–42 (1929–30). Quotations are from Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, trans. Michael Scammell (New York, 1964). Originally titled The Defense, since the 1990s the translation has consistently been published as The Luzhin Defense. Scammell’s translation is on the whole faithful to the original, but any departures from the Russian are noted in parentheses, and refer to the Russian original, Zashchita Luzhina, published in Vladimir Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh (SS) (St. Petersburg, 1999), 2:306–465. 5 Vozrozhdenie, December 1, 3, 1927; Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, April 14, 1928. 6 E. A. Znosko-Borovskii, Kapablanka i Alekhin: Bor'ba za mirovoe pervenstvo (Paris, 1927); V. Sirin, “Shakhmatnyi kon',” Rul', October 23, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:558–59; V. Sirin, “E. A. Znosko-Borovskii: ‘Kapablanka i Alekhin,’” Rul', November 16, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:644. 7 V. Sirin, “Iubilei,” Rul', November 18, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:645–47 (my translation). 8 An anonymous reviewer cited, or possibly invented for rhetorical purposes, by the poet and critic Georgii Adamovich: Georgii Adamovich, “‘Sovremennye zapiski,’ kniga 40,” Poslednie novosti, October 31, 1929. parker.pmd 437 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 438 Luke Parker There is a long scholarly tradition of viewing The Luzhin Defense as a kind of chess problem. This view finds support in Nabokov’s own skill as a problematist, the complex pattern of the novel’s plot and its repetitions, the unique gifts of its protagonist, and the fact that there is a chess problem embedded in the novel, produced by the character Valentinov, who is often seen as taking on a vital quasi-authorial role akin to Nabokov’s.9 Yet as others have pointed out, the protagonist Luzhin emphatically does not compose chess problems.10 Furthermore, the pivotal event of the novel is Luzhin’s mental breakdown in the middle of the most important tournament match of his career, against the Italian grandmaster Turati. In a 1929 letter to his mother responding to her praise of the novel, Nabokov is anxious specifically for her opinion of this centerpiece: “The chess part is laid out, in my opinion, in a very ‘popular’ way. You do not write whether you liked the game (the last one) at the tournament, with Turati. I took great pains over it (ia mnogo nad nei bilsia).”11 Among those skeptical of critics’ search for chess problem analogies in the novel, Leona Toker’s position, hinting at the role of competition, is the best starting point: “the novel mimics separate features of both a chess match and a chess problem.”12 And indeed there have been a number of more recent, illuminating historical studies linking the novel to its competitive chess context of the 1920s, including historical developments such as the newly professionalized world of international chess tournaments, the rise of the sport as a worldwide media phenomenon and its self-conception as an evolving art, and the recent emergence of the Hypermodern school of chess play.13 Yet it remains to relate these developments back to the central fact of Luzhin’s chess life: the role of competitive performance in his professional career, including his relation to his primary opponent, the Italian Turati. This raises the further question of Nabokov’s own artistic development— and the importance of this novel, construed as a performance before the wider literary emigration, to Nabokov’s career in exile. However one breaks down the story of Nabokov’s reception by the interwar Russian émigré community—and there are at least three recent attempts—one must place The Luzhin Defense at its center.14 It marked a qualitative and quantitative shift in critical attention. As 9 See Alexander Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn' pisatelia Sirina,” in Nabokov, SS 2:26–41; Boyd, Russian Years, 321–40; Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge, England, 1992), 82–100; and Don Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, 1985), 83–92. 10 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 68; SS 2:342. 11 Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokov, October 18, 1929, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 12 Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, 1989), 79. 13 See Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford, 2011), 90–106; Daniel Edelman, “Cooks, Forks, Waiters: Chess Problems in Nabokov’s The Defense,” American Chess Journal 3 (1994): 44– 58; and Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn',” in Nabokov, SS 2:26–41. 14 The most convincing of these three schemes belongs to Nikolai Mel'nikov: the years 1922–29, characterized by sparse but favorable reviews; 1929–37, a period opened by a breakthrough novel seizing the attention of the whole critical community and holding it for the duration; and 1937–40, with its noticeable cooling off of readers’ and critics’ enthusiasm, despite Nabokov’s continued prestige and prominence. See N. G. Mel'nikov and O. A. Korostelev, Klassik bez retushi: Literaturnyi mir o tvorchestve Vladimira Nabokova (Moscow, 2000), 55. For others see O. N. Shekhovtsova, “U istokov nabokovedeniia,” in Klassika i sovremennost' v literaturnoi kritike russkogo zarubezh'ia 1920–1930-kh godov: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. T. G. Petrova, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2005), 2:95–110; and L. A. Birger and A. V. Ledenev, “Strasti po Nabokovu: Tvorchestvo V. Sirina v emigrantskoi kritike,” in Klassika i sovremennost', 2:111–30. parker.pmd 438 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 439 Khodasevich remarks in our epigraph, the novel garnered Nabokov the far more numerous and probing inquiries of the broader emigration in Paris and elsewhere.15 In 1928 there were less than ten reviews of Nabokov’s work across the emigration; in 1930 there were more than fifty.16 The Luzhin Defense was Nabokov’s first novel published in a thick journal whose every issue was reviewed in all the major newspapers, including Poslednie novosti and Vozrozhdenie in Paris, where the emigration’s two major critics, Georgii Adamovich and Khodasevich respectively, were based. Henceforth throughout the thirties, all of Nabokov’s major Russian novels, every one of which was serialized in Sovremennye zapiski (where he was present in thirty-eight of the forty-one issues published between Autumn 1929 and 1940), received prominent critical attention.17 How, then, did this novel effect Nabokov’s breakthrough into the first ranks—a feat not easy to achieve for younger, less established émigré writers?18 In particular, what is the role of that other embedded text, “The Gambit,” the unfinished novel by Luzhin’s father, whose artistic development in exile and failed attempt to write Luzhin’s life invite comparison with Nabokov’s? I suggest that the roles of Turati and Luzhin’s father demonstrate the importance of competition and co-creativity to Nabokov’s art. This will appear to fly in the face of Nabokov’s renowned passion for the solitary practice of chess problem composition. Certainly the notion of problem composition as a theoretically pure form of creative selfexpression was familiar to Nabokov, who published his problems alongside his poems, posing an equivalence between his lyric and problem-setting selves; as he later remarked, the relation between problem setter and problem solver is analogous to that between author and reader.19 Yet a piece published by Alexander Alekhine in French in 1929, the year Nabokov was writing The Luzhin Defense, sheds light on the necessity of co-creation in championship chess in a way that suggests its implications for Nabokov’s own artistic practice. Crucially, Alekhine recognizes the considerable temptation of chess problems as an ideally solitary form of creative work—and, significantly in the light of Luzhin’s psychotic break, as a protection from madness. In “The Two Forms of Chess Art,” a preface to a well known French problematist’s collection, Alekhine touches on the very theme of The Luzhin Defense when he warns that the strain of competitive chess matches is uniquely dangerous to professional players: Sporting pleasures unknown to [chess problem] composers ... are in truth merely the ransom for the enormous mental and nervous effort, disproportionate to the attainable result, that events of importance (matches, tournaments) demand, and which is unknown to the problematist. ... In addition, let us recall and not 15 Vladimir Khodasevich, “Knigi i liudi: ‘Sovremennye zapiski’ kniga 65,” Vozrozhdenie, February 25, 1938, 9. 16 See Brian Boyd, “Émigré Responses to Nabokov (I–IV),” The Nabokovian 17–20 (Fall 1986–Spring 1988); and Michael Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York, 1986). 17 Mel'nikov and Korostelev, Klassik bez retushi, 55. 18 See Mark Slonim’s description, in that very year, of Sovremennye zapiski as a promoter of the “academy” in art: Mark Slonim, “Molodye pisateli za rubezhom,” Volia Rossii 10–11 (1929): 100–118. 19 See Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, 1966), 290. For his revised formula, substituting “reader” for “the world,” see Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York, 1973), 183. parker.pmd 439 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 440 Luke Parker conceal from the uninitiated the sad truth that so many elite minds among chess artists (for example Morphy, Steinitz, Pillsbury, Minckwitz and others) have sunk into an unconscious oblivion, while similar cases are unknown in the annals of problem composers.20 To avoid such oblivion, Alekhine proposes the ideal isolation of chess problem composition: “I love the idea of composition itself. It would be pleasurable to be able to create on my own, without the obligation, as in a match, of adjusting my plans to those of another, the opponent, in order to produce something enduring.”21 For Alekhine, as for Nabokov, an ideally isolated form of creative work is alluring. Whether this is the product of their similar upbringing, or temperament, or even the nature of their gift, it is clear that both resented the hindrance of others’ involvement in their ultimate aim of producing something of lasting value (fig. 1). FIG. 1 Alexander Alekhine, 1921 Yet we should remember that Alekhine is writing a promotional preface to a book of chess problems, and that, in reality, he did not take his own advice. As he admits, his career and reputation was based exclusively on competitive play: “for my part, I must confess that 20 A. Alekhine, “Les deux formes de l’art aux échecs,” in Frédéric Lazard, Mes problèmes et études d’échecs (Paris, 1929), viii (my translation). 21 Alekhine, “Les deux formes,” vii. parker.pmd 440 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 441 despite the pull exerted on me by the idea of composition, despite the desire I have had many times of trying my hand at it, I have not created anything of this sort worthy of attention.” Alekhine goes on to stress the essential role of co-creation, describing the “private drama (drame intime) which is continuously unfolding in the mind of the master throughout a serious battle, a drama without example in the practice of any other art.”22 In a passage in which Alekhine sounds more Nabokovian than Nabokov, he stresses the rarity of a genuinely equal co-creator: Oh! this opponent (adversaire), this collaborator in spite of himself, whose conception of Beauty almost always differs from yours and whose means (force, imagination, technique) are often too limited to second you effectively! How many disappointments he brings the master-artist aspiring not only to victory, but also and above all to creating an enduring work of art. What a torment— inconceivable in any other art or science—to feel your thought, your fantasy obligatorily chained, by the very order of things, to those of another, all too often mediocre and always so different from your own.23 I would suggest for Nabokov this torment was, on the contrary, very much conceivable in that “other art” of literature. Alekhine’s description of the competitive, interactive nature of chess artistry illuminates Nabokov’s practice as he pursued a career in literature. Alekhine’s striking language, emphasizing the mental duel of the two players, suggests the sporting confrontation of an agon to which they alone are privy. I argue that in The Luzhin Defense Nabokov explores the importance of competition as an analogy to literary creation, and that we can understand the role of the novel in Nabokov’s career as part of a broader strategy of co-creative opposition to his fellow writers in exile. Thus besides revising our already rich understanding of Nabokov’s philosophical conception of art, this investigation bears more importantly on our comparatively underdeveloped historical understanding of Nabokov’s broader literary practice as a Russian émigré writer. ÉMIGRÉ LITERATURE AND “THE GAMBIT” Embedded in The Luzhin Defense is the description of an unfinished novella by Luzhin’s father called “The Gambit.” His father is a writer of adolescent fiction who had enjoyed success and a modest reputation in Imperial Russia, but is now a parody of the backwardlooking old guard of obsolescent—because previously so contemporary—Russian literature: “Through his books (and they all, except for a forgotten novel called Fumes, were written for boys, youths, and high school students, and came in sturdy colorful covers) there constantly flitted the image of a fair-haired lad, “headstrong,” “brooding,” who later turned into a violinist or a painter, without losing his moral beauty in the process.”24 When his real son does not turn out like that, the father conscripts Luzhin’s life story into his latest novella, forcing his son’s actual image into the single trademark mold from which all his young 22 Ibid., vii, viii. Ibid., vii–viii. 24 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 25; SS 2:315. 23 parker.pmd 441 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 442 Luke Parker prerevolutionary protagonists were cast: “The writer Luzhin did not himself notice the stylized nature of his recollection. Nor did he notice that he had endowed his son with the features of a musical rather than a chess-playing prodigy, the result being both sickly and angelic—eyes strangely veiled, curly hair, and a transparent pallor.”25 Later in the novel readers are given a revealing description of one of his books, Tony’s Adventures, which Luzhin’s fiancée has happened to read in her childhood. Here are Luzhin’s father’s patented plot conveniences—with the narrator’s patented (parenthetical) undermining of them: [Luzhin’s fiancée] thought for some reason of a book she had read in childhood in which all the difficulties in the life of a schoolboy, who had run away from home together with a dog he had saved, were resolved by a convenient (for the author) fever—not typhus, not scarlet fever, but just “a fever”—and the young stepmother whom he had not loved hitherto so cared for him that he suddenly began to appreciate her and would call her Mamma, and a warm tearlet would roll down her face and everything was fine.26 It is significant that “The Gambit” remains unfinished, as this unwritten novella represents the natural death of a certain kind of writer, who gradually asphyxiates as the oxygen of the old world runs out: Luzhin senior, many years later (in the years when his every contribution (fel'eton) to émigré newspapers seemed to him to be his swan song—and goodness knows how many of these swan songs there were, full of lyricism and misprints) planned to write a novella about precisely such a chess-playing small boy, who was taken from city to city by his father (foster father in the novella). He began to write it in 1928—after returning home from a meeting of the Union of Émigré Writers (s zasedaniia), at which he had been the only one to turn up.27 In that sense “The Gambit” functions as a parody of backward-looking émigrés in general, of those who cannot adapt to the changed circumstances of emigration. The case of Luzhin’s mother- and father-in-law, fellow Russian émigrés, is especially intriguing. They live in a “gimcrack” (lubochnaia) Berlin apartment, a grotesque caricature, as their daughter notes, of their actual former residence in St. Petersburg.28 Yet the father-in-law is a successful businessman who has clearly adapted to his new surroundings, recouping the fortune that was taken from him by the Revolution.29 Luzhin’s father, then, can more accurately be termed a parody of those exiled writers who, once deprived of their established Russian readership and familiar milieu, fail to make use of the gift of freedom from traditional Russian censorship (be it Soviet or Tsarist) recently extolled by Nabokov in “Anniversary.” 25 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 77–78; SS 2:348. Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 162; SS 2:404. 27 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 75; SS 2:347. 28 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 105; SS 2:367. 29 A reprise of Nabokov’s sympathetic portrayal of entrepreneurs in his previous novel King, Queen, Knave, which features a gifted German businessman, Dreyer, who has made his fortune while others were losing theirs in the 1923 Hyperinflation. On the rarity of such a sympathetic portrayal of an entrepreneur in European fiction of the 1920s see Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, 2010), 238. 26 parker.pmd 442 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 443 The point is that the ideal freedom of exile earlier proclaimed in “Anniversary” can only be achieved by actively overcoming one of the basic conditions of exile itself: a limited audience.30 For in the absence of state censorship there was still the obstacle of “the general opinion,” what Khodasevich later called the “social command,” requiring of an émigré writer “that in the philosophical and artistic sense his works be uncomplicated and outdated.”31 It is tempting to see in Ivan Luzhin (the father’s name we deduce at the end from his son’s patronymic) a carnival mirror-image of the great émigré writer Ivan Bunin: the kind of washed-up relic that Bunin might conceivably be in a nightmare world, stripped of his prodigious gifts (even Nabokov, hardly prodigal with praise, rated his prose highly, and his poetry even higher).32 On this reading Ivan Luzhin would be to Ivan Bunin as The Gift’s fictional Shirin is to the real life Nabokov-Sirin: the dark dream double of the author, drained of his redemptive talent. On such writers falls Nabokov’s full ire, a display of the “science of scorn” vaunted in “Anniversary.” Not only does Luzhin’s father’s death “not interrupt [Luzhin’s] work,” but his death after a brief and lonely illness, presumably pneumonia, is described in cruelly laconic terms: “his end was not pacific (byla nespokoina). The board of the Union of Émigré Writers honored his memory with a minute of silence (vstavaniem).”33 In order to take advantage of his exilic freedom, a writer needed to resist the hazy commonplaces of the émigré perspective, represented by the Russophilic kitsch of Luzhin’s mother-in-law. Yet this elder Luzhin’s parodic function serves a more essential cause: the character of Ivan Luzhin can be said to underwrite Nabokov’s own position as a novelist, in the sense that he guarantees Nabokov’s entry into the first ranks—by allowing Nabokov to outwrite him. Ivan Luzhin and Nabokov face the same challenge: to write, at the tail end of the 1920s, the story of a young chess player’s development from prodigy to professional during the tumultuous years of 1914–22.34 For his part, Luzhin Senior finds what he perceives to be the reigning literary conventions of émigré fiction impossible to reconcile with his own experience: Now, a decade and a half later, these war years turned out to be an exasperating obstacle; they seemed an encroachment upon creative freedom, for in every book describing the gradual development of a given human personality one had somehow to mention the war, and even the hero’s dying in his youth could not provide a way out of this situation. There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background. With the revolution it was even worse. The general opinion was 30 See the Paris-based novelist Gaito Gazdanov’s comments on this limitation, where Nabokov is the sole exception to the failure of the younger generation of Russian émigrés (Gazdanov himself included): Gaito Gazdanov, “O molodoi emigrantskoi literature,” Sovremennye zapiski 60 (1936): 404–8. 31 Vladislav Khodasevich, “Pered kontsom,” Vozrozhdenie, August 22, 1936. 32 V. Sirin, “Iv. Bunin: Izbrannye stikhi,” Rul', May 22, 1929; Nabokov, SS 2:672–76. 33 Nabokov, “Iubilei,” SS 2:645; idem, The Luzhin Defense, 96, 82; SS 2:361, 352. See also V. Sirin, “Dar,” Sovremennye zapiski 63–67 (1937–38); and Vladimir Nabokov, Dar (New York, 1952). 34 For an intriguing reading that offers a different interpretation of the bond I see between Ivan Luzhin and Nabokov, explaining Nabokov’s novel as bringing to fruition Ivan Luzhin’s “attempted defence of his son,” see Karshan, Art of Play, 102. parker.pmd 443 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 444 Luke Parker that it had influenced the course of every Russian’s life; an author could not have his hero go through it without getting scorched, and to dodge it was impossible. This amounted to a genuine violation of the writer’s free will.35 The deep irony of Luzhin’s father protesting these constraints is that Nabokov has, in the previous chapter, just pulled off exactly this dodge.36 In his Foreword to the English translation of the novel, over thirty years later, Nabokov is so keen to point out the unconventionality of this chapter (“an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph”) not so much because it is formally daring (unsignaled chronological leaps in narrative were hardly radical in 1929, let alone 1964), but because it was such a breach of émigré expectations.37 To write an émigré novel about a prerevolutionary Russian childhood was not new: the third installment of Bunin’s The Life of Arseniev was enthusiastically reviewed by Nabokov in early 1929.38 Nor was writing about the exilic present: Nadezhda Teffi, one of the emigration’s most popular writers, had created her own genre of sketches of Russian Paris in the early 1920s. But to combine the two, leapfrogging from 1912 to 1928 over the crisis years of 1914–22, was a defiant choice. Thus Nabokov invents a writer who ostentatiously bemoans conventional restraints while he, Nabokov, ostentatiously bucks them. In another sense, however, Ivan Luzhin’s failure to finish “The Gambit” can be attributed more to limitations of talent than imagination. Ivan Luzhin is in fact able to picture the effects of war and revolution, correctly sensing that such historical references are integral to the true story of his son’s development, and that they do not simply satisfy the conventional demands of émigré readers: “There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background.”39 The aging writer is simply unable to realize these familiar references in his writing, bound as it is to the generic conventions of his prewar “books for boys.”40 Nabokov, for his part, does not, any more than Ivan Luzhin, directly represent the effects of history. Instead, he slyly hands his protagonist over to the care of Valentinov— foremost of those unavoidable “characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image”— until the story reaches the present of 1928. Valentinov serves as a counterpart to Ivan Luzhin in two senses: in the story itself, acting as a surrogate “chess father” who chaperones Luzhin through the war and revolution while his real father is safely abroad, and on the metaliterary plane, where Valentinov is a character invented by Nabokov to solve the thorny problem of broaching historical events in émigré fiction. Like Ivan Luzhin’s fictional 35 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 79–80; SS 2:349–50. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction, 242n.24. 37 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 9. Such a leap of sixteen years exactly replicates the gap from 1851 to 1867 brooked at the end of Sentimental Education by Flaubert, one of Nabokov’s acknowledged literary masters. On “this great gap of time scarcely recorded, this narrative void,” see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), 207. 38 V. Sirin, “Sovremennye zapiski: XXXVII,” Rul', January 30, 1929; Nabokov, SS 2:668–71. 39 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 80; SS 2:350. 40 As Nabokov later dismissed Joseph Conrad, and, to a lesser extent, Ernest Hemingway; perhaps vaunting his own maturity, he added that, “in mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile” (Strong Opinions, 40). 36 parker.pmd 444 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 445 underwriting, the deployment of the invented impresario Valentinov to help ford the narrative chasm separating Luzhin the prodigy from Luzhin the professional, demonstrated to the wider readership of Sovremennye zapiski Nabokov’s own mastery of emplotment. Nabokov’s narrative move also shifts the focus of the novel onto the present of 1928, where Ivan Luzhin’s more talented son is facing a similar predicament to his father—a stalled career: “Looking back over eighteen and more years of chess Luzhin saw an accumulation of victories at the beginning and then a strange lull, bursts of victories here and there but in general—irritating and hopeless draws thanks to which he imperceptibly earned the reputation of a cautious, impenetrable, prosaic (sukhogo) player.”41 In setting up this parallel between a career in literature and a career in chess, Nabokov posits an equivalence between two of the possible artistic outlets for Russian émigrés in the 1920s. This equivalence at once validates chess, so often derided as an unworthy outlet for genuine intelligence or creativity, and highlights the interdependence and sporting competition vital to the work of a writer. “TARD, TARD, TRÈS TARD”: TURATI’S GAMBIT Of the many meanings of the title The Luzhin Defense, one of the most intriguing is the connotation of “Luzhin defended,” reading Nabokov’s novel as a defense of chess against the historical charge of triviality, or even immorality. This was a claim he more than once made for sports played at the highest level. By emphasizing the universality of play, Nabokov defended the popularity of sport against the common charge of indicating a post-First World War drop in morality.42 In a 1925 essay on heavyweight boxing he specifically stressed the need for a partner, if not an antagonist: “Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts and family jests—is play. ... A child knows (khorosho znaet), that in order to play to his heart’s content, he must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two (razdvoit'sia). Or to put it another way, there is no play without competition.”43 Through the centerpiece description of the Turati-Luzhin game, Nabokov not only demonstrates that grandmaster competitions do approach art, but shows that they approach art precisely through this agonistic framework. In other words, in this novel Nabokov bears out Alekhine’s conception of art in chess as the co-creation of a work of enduring value. Nabokov’s in-depth exploration of grandmaster Luzhin’s development in relation to his competitors sheds new light on the topical question of émigré creativity. Luzhin’s chess career in many respects follows Nabokov’s career in literature much more than it does reallife chess players of Nabokov’s time. For all Luzhin’s similarities to such historical world championship contenders as Akiba Rubinstein, the heavy-set and mercurial Polish grandmaster, Nabokov commits the strategic anachronism of making Luzhin his near-exact contemporary, born in 1898, the year before Nabokov.44 The real chess players competing 41 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 97; SS 2:362. Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn',” in Nabokov, SS 2:29. 43 V. Sirin, “Braitenshtreter-Paolino,” Slovo, December 28, 29, 1925; Nabokov, SS 1:749. The translation is from Thomas Karshan, “Everything Plays: Vladimir Nabokov’s Ringside Vision of Art and Life,” Times Literary Supplement (May 3, 2012): 14. 44 Karshan, Art of Play, 96. 42 parker.pmd 445 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 446 Luke Parker for the world championship in the late 1920s were all born in the great modernist decade of the 1880s.45 It is often missed that Luzhin similarly turns from “Wunderkind” to “maestro” only after the First World War: Luzhin’s career in fact follows the pattern of Nabokov’s literary generation.46 The case of Alekhine, who was born in 1892 and eventually attained the title of world champion in 1927, is an intermediary one. Alekhine was winning national tournaments on the eve of the war, yet, as Znosko-Borovskii points out, it was only in exile that Alekhine turned from his planned career in the diplomatic service to supporting himself with his chess playing: “Great upheavals were needed in order that, after he had broken out of Russia for overseas and been left without means, he should be forced to search for a source of income in chess.”47 This puts Alekhine in company with Nabokov, whose options for a career outside his art, however little desired it might have been, were severely constrained by exile (as noted above in connection with his delayed French work permit). Luzhin’s position within the broader context of Russia Abroad is, like Alekhine and Nabokov’s, an uncommon one. Defined in opposition to other common émigré types, Luzhin is neither surviving on nostalgic kitsch like his mother-in-law or his father, nor jumping on the bandwagon of the entertainment industry like Valentinov the movie producer, nor again assimilating into the mercantile Amerikanismus of Weimar Germany like his enterprising father-in-law.48 He belongs to that small class of cosmopolitan practitioners of an increasingly popular but still underesteemed art. Luzhin is followed with curiosity by the public, pictured in the newspapers, and argued over by experts. Yet at his pinnacle he is understood by Turati alone. The focus of grandmaster Luzhin’s mature chess career in 1928 is his rivalry with a more innovative opponent, against whom he is competing for a chance to challenge the current world champion of chess (in real life the Russian émigré Alekhine, as readers will remember). His anxious attempts to revitalize his career stem from his sense of being surpassed by his Italian rival, Turati, who has recently successfully debuted an experimental new opening. This anxiety is described in a direct analogy to the competition of artistic innovation: Luzhin’s present plight was that of a writer or composer (khudozhnik) who, having assimilated the latest things in art at the beginning of his active career and caused a temporary sensation with the originality of his devices, all at once notices that a change has imperceptibly taken place around him, that others, sprung from goodness knows where, have left him behind in the very devices where he recently led the way (byl pervym), and then he feels himself robbed, sees only ungrateful imitators in the bold artists (smel'chakakh) who have 45 José Raúl Capablanca (1888), Aron Nimzowitsch (1886—the same year as Valentinov, and also Vladislav Khodasevich), Efim Bogoliubov (1889). 46 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 78; SS 2:349. For example, émigrés Gaito Gazdanov (b. 1903) and Nina Berberova (b. 1901), and on the Soviet side, Iurii Olesha (b. 1899) and Valentin Kataev (b. 1897). 47 Znosko-Borovskii, Kapablanka i Alekhin, 82. 48 Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994). parker.pmd 446 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 447 overtaken him, and seldom understands that he himself is to blame, he who has petrified (zastyvshii) in his art which was once new but has not advanced since then.49 It is interesting to note the attempt in the English translation to clarify Nabokov’s analogy between chess and other arts. The Russian word khudozhnik explicitly includes the visual arts, whereas the English (“writer or composer”) excludes it. The point is, of course, that chess is a fully fledged art with its own history of technical and aesthetic development—an insight that Nabokov could have gleaned from Znosko-Borovskii’s Capablanca and Alekhine, with its discussions of chess schools and innovators in explicitly literary terms.50 Luzhin’s sole ambition is to catch back up to one such bold innovator, Turati the Hypermodernist “representative of the latest fashions in chess,” by refuting the Italian grandmaster’s opening and, by extension, perceived primacy.51 It is to concoct such a defense that Luzhin does not attend his father’s funeral, works intensely late into the night, and is in a state of mental exhaustion by the time of the tournament.52 These preparations, however, pose the problem of diminishing returns. Luzhin is undoubtedly one of the world’s great players, described as having “long ago entered the ranks of international grandmasters, extremely well known, cited in all chess textbooks, a candidate among five or six others for the title of world champion.”53 Yet his progress in this competitive field is hampered by an inability to replicate in games the daring moves he can conjure in training: “The bolder his imagination, the livelier his invention during his secret work between matches, the more oppressive became his feeling of helplessness when the contest began and the more timidly and circumspectly he played.”54 Where thus far the description of Luzhin’s career could apply to any branch of art—and most pertinently to the literary career of an émigré writer— here Luzhin faces a problem unique to the performing arts: live public creation under time constraints. There is what the narrator elsewhere calls a “ghostly barrier ... preventing him from coming first,” a blockage that others could sense, such as his manager Valentinov, who dropped Luzhin when he felt the young prodigy’s run was coming to an end. Although he has previously taken solace in blindfold displays, pleasurable in their unimpeded immateriality, these only tire Luzhin further, lessening his chances of freeing himself from his rut.55 The “Luzhin defense” which he intends to deploy against Turati thus has all the ecstatic force of a final gamble: “Looking back he saw with something of a shudder how slowly he had been going of late, and having seen it he plunged with gloomy passion into new calculations, inventing and already vaguely sensing the harmony of the moves he needed: a dazzling (oslepitel'nuiu) defense.”56 49 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 97; SS 2:361–62. For a rich reading of the implications of Nabokov’s review of this book, and of the importance for Nabokov of Znosko-Borovsky’s vision of chess, already shot through with literary associations, see Karshan, Art of Play, 95. 51 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 96; SS 2:361. 52 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 91, 96; SS 2:357–58, 361. 53 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 97–98; SS 2:362. 54 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 97; SS 2:362. 55 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 92; SS 2:358. 56 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 98; SS 2:362. 50 parker.pmd 447 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 448 Luke Parker The Hypermodernists’ resemblance to the Futurists (Italian as well as Russian) in their Marinetti-like performative self-promotion is likely the reason for the nationality of Luzhin’s opponent Turati. For example, one of the Hypermodernists, the Hungarian Gyula Breyer, is said to have quipped, “After 1 e4 White’s game is in its last throes,” a deliberate exaggeration which contains a kernel of insight (fig. 2).57 Breyer’s idea, which is behind the fictional Turati’s usual strategy of “moving up on the flanks, leaving the middle of the board unoccupied by Pawns but exercising a most dangerous influence on the center from the sides,” is that the unguarded “King’s pawn” at e4 is not an asset, but a liability that becomes a target for Black.58 This is why Richard Réti, another influential theoretician of the time and a world championship contender, put into practice the “Réti Opening” in 1923, on which Turati’s debut, “triumphantly unleashed” in Rome, may be based.59 In this system, which opens 1.Nf3 d5 2.c4, White as it were invites Black to occupy the center himself (fig. 3). FIG. 2 King’s Pawn Opening: 1.e4 FIG. 3 Réti Opening: 1.Nf3 d5 2.c4 From this position, “White endeavours to control the central squares directly or indirectly with pieces, withholding the advance of center pawns to the fourth rank [that is, d4 or e4] until Black’s intentions are known. Meanwhile White remains poised to attack any enemy pawn center that might be set up.”60 The psychological stakes of this play are well formulated by Thomas Karshan: “In hypermodern theory, the player, exercising guile, hangs back, allowing his opponent to expose and eventually destroy himself as a result of his own aggression.”61 It is worth noting that this opening was at one time known as the “Landstrasse Gambit,” because White’s second move (2.c4) offers a pawn to Black, who can take it with his pawn 57 David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, eds., The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1996), 58. Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 96; SS 2:361. 59 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 94; SS 2:360. 60 Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, 337. 61 Karshan, Art of Play, 98. 58 parker.pmd 448 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 449 at d5. Strictly speaking, a gambit is defined as “an opening in which one player offers to give up material, usually a pawn ... in the expectation of gaining a positional advantage.”62 In other words, the gambit practiced by players like Turati is a calculated risk—deepening the irony in the title of Ivan Luzhin’s unfinished novella, “The Gambit,” in which the aging writer is insufficiently daring, taking no artistic or formal risks whatsoever. In the event, however, Turati plays a very different kind of gambit, one calculated to bring not a positional but a psychological advantage: “At this point a strange thing happened. Turati, although having white, did not launch his famous opening and the defense Luzhin had worked out proved an utter waste.”63 In chess terms, Turati has perhaps opened by advancing his pawns in order to occupy the center: the exact time-honored technique which representatives of the latest fashions were supposed to have abolished. Or, more likely, as U.S. National Master Walker Griggs pointed out in conversation with the author, Turati has opened with the Giuoco Piano (literally, the Quiet Game), often known, appropriately for Turati, as the Italian Opening: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 (fig. 4). This opening, often taught to beginners because of its cautiousness and eponymous “quietness,” well matches the narrator’s description of Turati’s opening as “innocent” and “jejune.”64 Furthermore, the Giuoco Piano was historically considered the very antithesis of the kind of opening Turati usually plays: “the name ... until the 19th century was often applied to any opening that was not a gambit.”65 FIG. 4 Giuoco Piano: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 In the moment, Turati’s exact intentions remain hidden to Luzhin, whose overconfident first thoughts are channeled through the narrator: either “Turati had anticipated possible complications or else had simply decided to play warily, knowing the calm strength which Luzhin had revealed at this tournament.”66 On rereading, however, it appears that, relying on the luck in which he has hitherto placed perhaps excessive trust, Turati attempts to take advantage of Luzhin’s tunnel vision.67 He appears to notice that Luzhin can be shaken: “there was undoubtedly some trick concealed in the innocent, jejune (vialom) opening proposed by Turati, and Luzhin settled down to play with particular care.”68 Jockeying for 62 Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, 337, 148. Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 136; SS 2:387. 64 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 137; SS 2:387. 65 Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, 153. 66 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 136; SS 2:387. 67 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 134; SS 2:386. As Leona Toker puts it, Turati “has thought not only about the game but also about the player” (Nabokov, 71). 68 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 137; SS 2:387. 63 parker.pmd 449 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 450 Luke Parker a psychological edge is implicit in his admonishment of Luzhin’s tardiness before the game begins: “‘Tar, tar, tretar,’—zataratoril ... Turati.” In the Russian original, these French words (tard, tard, très tard)—abstracted into demonstrative noise by a heavy Italian accent— are echoed by the unexpected banality (nachal on trafaretneishim obrazom) of Turati’s opening, creating the impression of a deliberate strategy.69 Thus there is a further irony in Luzhin’s attempt to avoid lackluster play with a literally “blinding” (oslepitel'naia) defense: he is blindsided by Turati’s deployment of an opening that is, in Hypermodernist terms, lackluster. Nabokov shows how the abstracted conflict in chess matches between White and Black is always embodied through the third and fourth dimensions of personality and time. Yet Nabokov also recognizes that between matches, chess allows for—and at the top level demands—an independent communication between professionals via the medium of printed annotations of previous games. The most famous of such tournament games appear in print instantly, to be dissected, as the adjourned Luzhin-Turati match will be, by experts and enthusiasts. Turati seems to comprehend exactly where he stands in relation to Luzhin, and uses this psychological insight to outwit his opponent at the match. For Turati does in fact play a gambit: in omitting his famous opening he does not play his strongest hand and gambles that this will unbalance Luzhin enough that Turati can best him on the level playing field of a game shaped by a traditional opening. “AT FIRST IT WENT SOFTLY, SOFTLY, LIKE MUTED VIOLINS” The position at which the game is adjourned and abandoned after Luzhin’s mental collapse suggests that a traditional battle for control of the center may have been waged: And the newspapers printed an announcement that Luzhin had had a nervous breakdown before finishing the deciding game and that, according to Turati, black was bound to lose because of the weakness of the Pawn on f4. And in all the chess clubs the experts made long studies of the positions of the pieces, pursued possible continuations and noted white’s weakness at d3, but nobody could find the key to indisputable victory.70 As the experts’ disagreements indicate, the position is hardly conclusive. More important than the result, then, or the novelty of Turati’s opening or Luzhin’s “defense,” is the process itself, an imagined confrontation of the two grandmasters which is presented as a creative rally of two artists.71 The description of the game, hewing closely to an extended musical analogy, emphasizes this vacillation between duel and duet as the two trade plans and tactical blows. They are jockeying for position, each anticipating and rebuffing the incursions of the other, all under the pressure of the clock.72 Although the positional, strategic plan is primary, the game 69 Nabokov, Nabokov, 71 Nabokov, 72 Nabokov, 70 parker.pmd The The The The Luzhin Luzhin Luzhin Luzhin 450 Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, 136; SS 2:387. 153–54; SS 2:399. 137; SS 2:387. 138; SS 2:388. 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 451 includes numerous attempted “combinations”: tactical ploys based on some positional advantage, “a sequence of forcing moves with a specific goal,” often with a sacrifice present, and usually containing an element of surprise. The Turati-Luzhin game illustrates a basic feature of combinations, namely that in live play there may be a succession of them which are thwarted without being played out in full: “In games between grandmasters combinations, seen and avoided, may be overlooked by a beginner, playing through the game, who believes there are better moves, not seeing the combinative refutations.”73 Nabokov has his Italian and Russian grandmasters communicating with one another in perfect attunement, on their own level—just as Alekhine had described. The match is a partly improvised act of co-creation, an almost spiritual confluence that is utterly immaterial and independent of language. At first they probe one another’s defenses with the lightest possible touch: “if there was any threat it was entirely conventional—more like a hint to one’s opponent that over there he would do well to build a cover, and the opponent would smile, as if all this were an insignificant joke, and strengthen the proper place.”74 As they make more concerted efforts to attack, their communion, still just as synchronized, intensifies: “Luzhin’s thought roamed through entrancing and terrible labyrinths (debriakh), meeting there now and then the anxious thought of Turati, who sought the same thing as he. Both realized simultaneously that white was not destined to develop his scheme any further. ... New possibilities appeared, but still no one could say which side had the advantage.”75 To onlookers the game is unclear, but to the players the situation presents itself with such clarity that they arrive at the same conclusion at the same moment. The emphasis is on the players’ almost telepathic understanding of one another. Daniel Edelman, an International Master, has written of the Luzhin-Turati match as a “fantastic struggle of minds, a tug-of-war.”76 Again, Alekhine had pointed out precisely this hidden quality (drame intime) of the unfolding mental grappling. Alekhine had also signaled the danger of unconscious oblivion posed by the intensity of competitive play. Such a heightened connection is liable to be broken and irremediably shattered by any intrusion of the material world. Luzhin succumbs to precisely this pitfall: Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain—and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome (strashnoe), the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess (bezdn, v kotorye pogruzhalsia). He glanced (nevol'no vzglianul opiat') at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and absorbed (vtiagivali) 73 Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, 86. Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 137; SS 2:388. 75 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 138–39; SS 2:389. 76 Edelman, “Cooks, Forks, Waiters,” 46. 74 parker.pmd 451 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 452 Luke Parker him. There was horror in this, but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides chess? Fog, the unknown, non-being.77 It appears that only once Luzhin’s link to Turati is broken does chess reveal its “horror.” Given the preponderance of defense-related themes in the novel, it is easy to overlook a basic fact of Luzhin’s personality: Luzhin is not just a chess thinker, but also a sportsman— competition is the key to his nature. Like Alekhine, Luzhin prefers agonistic confrontation to solitary composition: “the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him.”78 Luzhin’s greatest pleasure is a heightened engagement, intensified by rules and time constraints, with another player’s consciousness. In other words, he relies on the rivalry of players such as Turati. It has been pointed out that Luzhin’s best play in a long time comes at the Berlin tournament, and that these games, granting him immortality in their renown, are due to his love for his new fiancée.79 Yet credit must also be given to the quality of his rival, for Turati’s influence is with Luzhin throughout the tournament: “He moved in step with (ne otstavaia ot) Turati. Turati scored a point and he scored a point; Turati scored a half and he scored a half. Thus they proceeded with their separate games, as if mounting the sides of an isosceles triangle and destined at the decisive moment to meet at the apex.”80 Such an intellectual yet human connection—almost communion—is what enables Luzhin to play at his best. This is especially true of Turati, to whom Luzhin particularly dislikes losing, because “by temperament, by his style of play and by his proclivity for fantastic arrayals (dislokatsii), [Turati] was a player with a kindred mentality (sklada) to [Luzhin’s] own.”81 If there is one character in the novel who truly knows Luzhin, it is his rival Turati, the only one who understands his art. When Luzhin’s fiancée later deprives him of chess, she is not so much depriving him of the game, which, after all, inexorably reasserts itself; fatally, she deprives Luzhin of fellow grandmasters—his only support—leaving him to face the abyss alone.82 THE SIRIN DEFENSE Nabokov’s own literary criticism leading up to The Luzhin Defense can be read as an extension of the same practice as Turati’s studied introduction of an unexpected gambit. It is at once the fruit of closely reading the competition and an attempt to broadcast Nabokov’s own artistic ethos. Much as Luzhin had studied Turati’s previous games for months before the Berlin tournament, Turati’s unexpected gambit implies a similarly penetrating 77 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 139; SS 2:389. Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 68; SS 2:342. 79 “Contrary to Valentinov’s theory, arousal of the senses has a positive effect on [Luzhin’s] creativity” (Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn',” in Nabokov, SS 2:35). 80 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 125; SS 2:380. 81 Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, 96–97; SS 2:361. 82 Alexander Dolinin notes Nabokov’s preoccupation with the theme of an artist’s (mistaken) renunciation of his art; on my reading, the essence of this art consists in the competition, which necessitates a partner (“Istinnaia zhizn',” in Nabokov, SS 2:36). 78 parker.pmd 452 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 453 engagement with Luzhin’s tournament performances. Through the bare transcriptions of these matches, the grandmaster can discern not only the moves but also the man. In 1925, Nabokov had written in “Breitensträter-Paolino” that one “must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody ... become two.”83 Nabokov went on at the end of the 1930s to dramatize precisely this situation in his last Russian novel, The Gift. As Turati extrapolates from Luzhin’s “texts” a conscious intentionality, so the protagonist of The Gift, Fyodor, extrapolates from the writings of the older poet Koncheyev a living mind with which he can converse. Fyodor’s conversations take the form of purely imaginary exchanges; for literature, unlike chess, has no space where the two practitioners or players can simultaneously interact and achieve communion. Yet in reviews of one another’s work, writers can attain a kind of temporally deferred, yet equally public, “imagined” competitive contest. Like Turati’s psychological gambit, conceived in isolation out of the silent scrutiny of another’s art, Nabokov’s literary criticism is fundamentally reactive, contingent on the makeup of the competition. Nabokov’s Russian reviews of his fellow émigrés are not so much evaluations as interventions: each piece is less a valuation of another writer’s contribution than constructive of Nabokov’s own identity as participant in the literary process in relation to those contributions. Part of Nabokov’s preparation for publishing The Luzhin Defense involved writing a review of one of the recent issues of Sovremennye zapiski, clearing a space as it were for his own future novelistic entry.84 In this review Nabokov praised Bunin and Khodasevich, and unabashedly mocked Georgii Adamovich and Irina Odoevtseva—the wife of Georgii Ivanov, fast friend of Adamovich and subsequently author of ad hominem attacks on Nabokov.85 This review effectively served as an entry into the current “Adamovich-Khodasevich polemics”—a productively agonistic struggle in its own right.86 This clash had flared up in 1928 between the two most prominent émigré critics. It revolved around Adamovich and Khodasevich’s two visions of how Russian writers should carry on their literary heritage in exile: respectively, a present-focused poetics of authenticity versus a canonically allusive poetics of cultural conservation. Even before he had begun writing The Luzhin Defense, Nabokov was aware of the battle lines in the Adamovich-Khodasevich polemics and had picked his side. From the mid- to late-1920s, Nabokov’s reviews played out his critical attitude to Russian literary Paris. Nabokov’s overt criterion of judgment is a given writer’s resistance to the commonplaces of emigration. In the late 1920s, Nabokov mocked the hazy imprecision and communal despondency of the young poets of Russian Paris, as in the following 1927 group poetry review: “On whom to place one’s hopes, whom to choose, upon what to 83 Nabokov, SS 1:749; Karshan, “Everything Plays,” 14. V. Sirin, “Sovremennye zapiski: XXXVII,” Rul', January 30, 1929; SS 2:668–71. 85 For example: “It is better to keep silent about the two poems of Adamovich. This subtle, sometimes brilliant literary critic writes utterly useless verse” (V. Sirin, “Sovremennye zapiski: XXXVII,” Rul', January 30, 1929; Nabokov, SS 2:671). 86 See Roger Hagglund, “The Russian Émigré Debate of 1928 on Criticism,” Slavic Review 32 (September 1973): 515–26; idem, “The Adamovich-Khodasevich Polemics,” Slavic and East European Journal 20 (Fall 1976): 239–52; David M. Bethea, Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Princeton, 1983), 317–31; and O. A. Korostelev and S. R. Fediakin, “Polemika G. V. Adamovicha i V. F. Khodasevicha (1927–1937),” Rossiiskii literaturovedcheskii zhurnal 4 (1994): 204–50. 84 parker.pmd 453 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM 454 Luke Parker remark? Surely not the tastelessness of Dovid Knut and not the pretentious prosaicism of the bland [Nikolai] Otsup. Perhaps the inspired chill of [Antonin] Ladinskii or the liveliness of [Nina] Berberova? Don’t know. God grant that the years of emigration have not been a waste for the Russian muse.”87 Already at work on The Luzhin Defense, he writes a review criticizing Alexey Remizov’s pseudo-archaic fables: “in them one senses not so much Muscovite daily life ... so much as Russian Paris.”88 He disparages the clichéd content of Odoevtseva’s novel Isolde: “The well-known fissure (nadlom) of our age. The well-known dances, cocktails, cosmetics. Add in the well-known émigré hysteria (nadryv), and the backdrop is prepared.”89 Thus Nabokov’s parodic portrayal of “The Gambit,” exposing Ivan Luzhin’s inability to overcome the commonplaces of the literary emigration, is of a piece with his critical practice. By contrast, Nabokov praises those who appear to him to strike out alone. The littleknown poet Georgii Pronin is praised for doing what Ivan Luzhin could not: “The enormous virtue of Pronin’s verse is that in it the fabled revolution and the fabled [historical] shifts are not felt at all. These quiet modest poems are as if written not in emigration but in the alder-tree backwoods, in that miraculous unchanging forested Russia where there is no room for communist cretins.”90 In a similar vein, Nabokov concludes a review of Khodasevich’s 1927 collected verse—the same review Khodasevich requested that Aikhenval'd send from Berlin to Paris—with an approving description of his narrow appeal: “Khodasevich is an enormous poet, but a poet, I think, not for everyone. He will repel anyone seeking relaxation and moonlit landscapes in his verse. But for those who are able to enjoy a poet without rooting about in his worldview and without demanding of him responsiveness, Khodasevich’s collected verse is an enchanting work of art.”91 In concert with these contemporary reviews, The Luzhin Defense can be read as a complex and allusive puzzle that refuses the expected “responsiveness” of émigré writing to the historical—and emotional—situation of Russia Abroad. Nabokov, like Turati, understood the necessity of engaging with the personality behind the writing, even when the opponent appeared to fall short of a worthy adversary. In fact, the frustration with this necessity was something of which Alekhine himself complained in the preface to Lazard’s collection of chess problems, describing the opponent as a “ball and chain.”92 The profession of an émigré writer was dependent, like the renown of émigré chess champions, on both a broader reading public (albeit far more modestly proportioned) and a smaller circle of influential “expert” reviewers. Upon its publication in Sovremennye zapiski, Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense was accorded the vague prestige attached to a Russian novel serialized in a thick journal, and was widely reviewed and praised for its “indisputable talent,” or roundly condemned in spite of it. Yet the novel was analyzed with penetrating insight in only a handful of reviews, mostly by fellow practitioners. Although 87 V. Sirin, “Sergei Rafalovich: ‘Terpkie budni.’ ‘Simon Volkhv,’” Rul', January 19, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:638. 88 V. Sirin, “Sovremennye zapiski: XXXVII,” Rul', January 30, 1929; Nabokov, SS 2:670. 89 V. Sirin, “Irina Odoevsteva: ‘Izol'da,’” Rul', October 30, 1929; Nabokov, SS 2:680. 90 V. Sirin, “Novye poety,” Rul', August 31, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:644. 91 V. Sirin, “Vladislav Khodasevich: Sobranie stikhov,” Rul', December 14, 1927; Nabokov, SS 2:652–53. 92 Alekhine, “Les deux formes,” viii. parker.pmd 454 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM The Gambit 455 what Alekhine had called the “torment” of this obligatory collaboration was perhaps exacerbated in literature by the more limited field of competitors, reviewers, and readers within the world of émigré letters, Nabokov was nonetheless able to fabricate his own mediocre adversary, Ivan Luzhin, whose poor performance effectively underwrote Nabokov’s entry into Sovremennye zapiski, the most prestigious journal of the emigration, space in which had been staked out by Nabokov’s Russian reviews of his real fellowpractitioners in the 1920s. Far from hampering Nabokov’s development as a “masterartist,” his interactions with competing writers in his non-fiction became in the fictional fairground mirror of The Luzhin Defense one of the very conditions of his success. parker.pmd 455 4/24/2017, 5:06 PM