The Defense is Vladimir Nabokov’s first mature novel. He has said of it that ‘of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth”‘. However, the subject matter, a chess player who becomes mentally unstable to the point of suicide, and the strictly patterned form, seem to belie this warmth. The key to understanding this seemingly paradoxical problem lies in understanding Nabokov’s view of both chess and art.  

When asked about his characters taking over events in his novels by an interviewer, Nabokov tartly responded: ‘”What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane”‘.This gives an insight into the control Nabokov has over his material, and his relentless shaping of characters, plot and form. His careful patterning of the chess-like structure of the novel does not detract from the emotions and realities of the characters. Another pivotal moment in the novel, the first chess match between Luzhin and his father, is also rendered in terms which could be seen as chess related: Luzhin Senior again laughed, and with trembling hand began to pour milk into a cut-glass tumbler, on the bottom of which lay a raspberry core, which now floated to the surface and circled, unwilling to be extracted. This image is important as it continues the black and white chess colours that run through the novel, but also because it refers to the closed logic of Luzhin’s interest in chess. The milk can be seen to represent renewal, life, and birth, whilst the dried raspberry husk represents death. By choosing to embark on this course, Luzhin has resigned himself to being trapped like the husk, ever-circling. We see here Nabokov’s hand, for this comes at an artistically appropriate moment, the moment when Luzhin can not go back.

Nabokov is honest about the deceits he practices, he shows you his workings. At the very start of the novel there is a scene with a girl eating an apple: ‘To the right a small girl sat on an enormous bale eating a green apple, her elbow propped in her palm’. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterise all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity and splendid insincerity’. It is this ’splendid insincerity’ which runs throughout the novel. Later in the novel, this scene is reproduced in a picture hung on a wall. The reader is aware of being deceived, but is forced to ask why one level of fiction, the first, is more realistic than another level, the second. This type of meta-fictional wrangling is where the direct link between chess and art becomes apparent. Speaking about chess problems, Nabokov explains the links between them and art: ‘

The links between chess and art become more apparent through the carefully plotted chess imagery in the novel. It is through chess that Luzhin can make sense of the difficult and chaotic world. At moments of high tension, we see Luzhin reverting to this chess language; for example, during the uncomfortable interview with his fiancée’s mother, he feels threatened and becomes preoccupied with the shadows on the floor: ‘Here the nuisances on the floor became so brazen that he involuntarily put out a hand to remove shadow’s King from the threat of light’s Pawn’. The reader can see Luzhin’s fear transmuted into a chess problem. The novel works on two levels here, we are privy to Luzhin’s consciousness and see how he creates order in an unpleasant situation, but we are also aware of the artifice of the imagery and see the author’s hand at work here, manipulating his characters.

As Gezari and Wimsatt say: ‘Nabokov’s novels, stress the enchantment of a delicate pattern, perceived as a whole, and the economy of design which depends on the strict functionalism of every element in the pattern’.

More striking still is Luzhin’s first encounter with chess. He is hiding in his father’s study when he overhears a virtuoso violinist talking to his lover on the telephone. Immediately following this, the violinist talks to him about chess, specifically linking chess and art saying ‘”Combinations are like melodies. You know, I can simply hear the moves”. This creates an interest in Luzhin that causes him to awaken the next day with ‘an incomprehensible feeling of excitement’. There is an idea of a displaced sexual awakening here, related to the eroticism of the overheard phone call and the excitement he feels upon waking. This idea is followed up when Luzhin locks himself in his room studying chess problems, and his father is ’seized by the suspicion that his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women’.

The name ‘Luzhin’ when heard by the English ear sounds similar to ‘illusion’. This is an aural clue to the nature of the character and a key to understanding his position. The novel functions as the imagination and consciousness of its protagonist, yet this protagonist has been assimilated to an illusion. The compression of these two ideas leaves us with Nabokov as shadow-master creating the illusions which are our only way into the novel. This is made explicit when we are told what is contained within Luzhin’s memory at the point of his breakdown:

In the darkness of his memory, as in two mirrors reflecting a candle, there was only a vista of converging lights with Luzhin sitting at a chessboard, and again Luzhin at a chessboard, only smaller, and then smaller still, an infinity of times.

Connolly talks about the transformation of Luzhin’s life when he discovers chess: ‘The external world is no longer an insubstantial shadow realm. Rather, it has become for him the tangible field for a cosmic chess match in which he was both opponent and playing piece’. This is an interesting statement because it engages with the idea that Luzhin as a character does not exist outside of chess, Luzhin is simply the realization of a single idea. It is only through embodying the idea of chess that Luzhin is created. In this way he is flagged as a fictional character, a literary device.

Critics have noted that rather than a chess game, Luzhin seems to be locked into a chess problem. Given that Nabokov was a celebrated composer of chess problems this is a reasonable assumption. D.B. Johnson points out that ‘Problems are chess solitaire and are by definition (in most types of problem) “rigged”. Black always loses’. This fits with Luzhin’s inexorable and pre-ordained movement towards his own death, his committing of ’sui-mate’, in the terms of the chess problem. Luzhin is identified as black throughout the novel; for example: ‘When finally Luzhin left the balcony and stepped back into the room, there on the floor lay an enormous square of moonlight, and in that light - his own shadow’. Luzhin is black as identified here, and in chess problems black always loses. Nabokov knows that black is going to lose in this case, and allowing Luzhin to think he is in a chess game rather than a chess problem, heightens the sense of meta-fictionality. Again we see the workings of the author and the capitulation of his character.

Nabokov himself has been cited as the shadowy other, the opponent in the all-pervasive game of chess which Luzhin is locked into. Vladislav Khodasevich, a critic of Nabokov’s has this to say about the authorial intrusions and the kind of power which the author has over his material: Nabokov’s novels are populated not only by human characters, but also by a multitude of literary devices, methods which, like elves or gnomes, alter the entire scenery before the reader’s eyes, thus proclaiming that the author him- self is uninterested in deceiving anyone with the illusion of life- likeness.

There are several examples of Nabokov’s intrusion and manipulation of his characters. As we have seen there are images and scenes which are repeated in different forms, such as the girl eating the apple, there is the extensive use of chess imagery, and there are techniques such as the sudden telescoping of time in chapter four. Nabokov himself refers to this shift, saying in the foreword that ‘an unexpected move is made by me in the corner of the board.’

Perhaps the most obvious link between chess and art in The Defense comes from the metafictional wrangling between the author and the reader. It is a work which creates uncomfortable moments through its verisimilitude in portraying mental illness and paranoia. The reader is constantly confounded by the artistry of the author, the shadowy opponent. It is not possible to take the book as only a realistic portrait of mental illness, nor only a cerebral puzzle, a game. It is both and it is neither. P.N. Humble vividly describes the connection between chess and writing: Every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures, first the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing, second the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboards.

Nabokov expects the reader to exercise both of these pleasures, to understand the abstraction and the execution at once. The act of reading The Defense must be detailed and it must look both backwards and forwards if it is to be completed successfully. It is the literary equivalent of a chess game.

Finally, Nabokov’s own words in his autobiography go some way towards explaining the way in which he linked chess and art, chess and fiction in the way we can see exemplified in The Defense : “it should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black” Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory “but between the composer and the solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world).