"Luzhin's Defense" is a complex novel metaphor. "Luzhin's Defense" a complex novel metaphor Summary defense of Luzhin
By the end of summer, the parents of ten-year-old Luzhin finally decide to inform their son that after returning from the village to St. Petersburg, he will go to school. Fearing the upcoming change in his life, little Luzhin, before the train arrives, runs away from the station back to the estate and hides in the attic, where, among other uninteresting things, he sees a chessboard with a crack. The boy is found, and the black-bearded man carries him from the attic to the carriage.
Luzhin senior wrote books, in them constantly flashed the image of a blond boy who became a violinist or painter. He often thought about what might come out of his son, whose uncommonness was undeniable, but unsolved. And the father hoped that his son's abilities would be revealed in the school, which was especially famous for its attentiveness to the so-called "inner" life of students. But a month later, the father heard cold words from the teacher, proving that his son is understood even less at school than he is: "The boy certainly has abilities, but there is some lethargy."
During breaks, Luzhin does not participate in general childish games and always sits alone. In addition, peers find strange fun in laughing at Luzhin about his father's books, calling him by the name of one of the heroes Antosha. When at home parents pester their son with questions about school, a terrible thing happens: he throws a cup and saucer on the table like a madman.
Only in April does the day come for the boy when he has a passion on which his whole life is doomed to focus. At the musical evening, a bored aunt, his mother's second cousin, gives him a simple chess lesson.
A few days later at school, Luzhin observes a chess game of his classmates and feels that somehow he understands the game better than the players, although he does not yet know all its rules.
Luzhin begins to skip classes - instead of school, he goes to his aunt to play chess. So a week passes. The teacher calls home to find out what's wrong with him. Father comes to the phone. Shocked parents demand an explanation from their son. He is bored to say anything, he yawns, listening to his father's exhortation. The boy is sent to his room. The mother sobs and says that both father and son are deceiving her. The father thinks with sadness how difficult it is to fulfill his duty, not to go where he is drawn uncontrollably, and then there are these strange things with his son ...
Luzhin beats an old man who often comes to his aunt with flowers. When faced with such early abilities for the first time, the old man prophesies to the boy: "You will go far." He explains the simple system of notation, and Luzhin, without figures and a board, can already play out the parts given in the magazine, like a musician reading a score.
Once the father, after explaining to his mother about his long absence (she suspects him of infidelity), invites his son to sit with him and play, for example, chess. Luzhin wins four games against his father and at the very beginning of the last one comments on one move in an unchildish voice: “Worst answer. Chigorin advises taking a pawn. " After his departure, the father sits in thought - his son's passion for chess amazes him. “It was in vain that she encouraged him,” he thinks of his aunt, and immediately recalls with longing his explanations with his wife ...
The next day, the father brings a doctor who plays better than him, but the doctor also loses game after game to his son. And from that time on, the passion for chess closes the rest of the world for Luzhin. After one club performance, a photo of Luzhin appears in a Moscow magazine. He refuses to attend school. He is begged for a week. Everything is decided by itself. When Luzhin runs away from home to his aunt, he meets her in mourning: “Your old partner has died. Come with me. " Luzhin runs away and does not remember whether he saw in the coffin a dead old man who had once beaten Chigorin - pictures of external life flicker in his mind, turning into delirium. After a long illness, his parents take him abroad. Mother returns to Russia earlier, alone. Once Luzhin sees his father in the company of a lady - and is very surprised that this lady is his Petersburg aunt. A few days later they receive a telegram about the death of their mother.
Luzhin plays in all large cities Russia and Europe with the best chess players. He is accompanied by his father and Mr. Valentinov, who organizes tournaments. There is a war, a revolution that has led to a legal expulsion abroad. In the twenty-eighth year, sitting in a Berlin coffee house, his father unexpectedly returns to the idea of \u200b\u200b\\ u200b \\ u200bthe story of a genius chess player who must die young. Before that, endless trips for his son did not make it possible to realize this plan, and now Luzhin Sr. thinks that he is ready to work. But a book thought out to the smallest detail is not written, although the author presents it, already finished, in his hands. After one of the country walks, getting wet under the downpour, the father falls ill and dies.
Luzhin continues tournaments around the world. He plays brilliantly, gives sessions and is close to playing a champion. At one of the resorts where he lives before the Berlin tournament, he meets his future wife, the only daughter of Russian emigrants. Despite Luzhin's vulnerability to the circumstances of life and outward clumsiness, the girl guesses in him a closed, secret artistry, which she attributes to the properties of a genius. They become husband and wife, a strange couple in the eyes of everyone around them. At the tournament, Luzhin, ahead of everyone, meets with his old rival Italian Turati. The game is interrupted in a draw position. Overstrain Luzhin becomes seriously ill. His wife arranges life in such a way that no reminder of chess would bother Luzhin, but no one can change his sense of self, woven from chess images and pictures of the outside world. The long-lost Valentinov calls on the phone, and his wife tries to prevent this man from meeting Luzhin, referring to his illness. Several times his wife reminds Luzhin that it is time to visit his father's grave. They plan to do so soon.
Luzhin's inflamed brain is busy solving an unfinished game with Turati. Luzhin is exhausted by his condition, he cannot free himself for a moment from people, from himself, from his thoughts, which are repeated in him, like moves made once. Repetition - in memories, chess combinations, flickering faces of people - becomes for Luzhin the most painful phenomenon. He "freaks out in horror at the inevitability of the next repetition" and comes up with a defense against a mysterious opponent. The main method of defense is to voluntarily, deliberately commit some ridiculous, unexpected action that falls out of the general planning of life, and thus confuse the combination of moves planned by the enemy.
Accompanying his wife and mother-in-law to the shops, Luzhin comes up with an excuse (visiting the dentist) to leave them. "A little maneuver," he grins in the taxi, stops the car and walks. It seems to Luzhin that he had done all this once before. He walks into a store that suddenly turns out to be a hairdresser's to avoid a complete repetition with this unexpected move. At the house Valentinov is waiting for him, offering Luzhin to star in a film about a chess player, in which real grandmasters take part. Luzhin feels that cinema is a pretext for a repetition trap, in which the next move is clear ... "But this move will not be made."
He returns home, with a concentrated and solemn expression, quickly walks through the rooms, accompanied by his crying wife, stops in front of her, puts the contents of his pockets, kisses her hands and says: “The only way out. You have to drop out of the game. " "We will play?" the wife asks. Guests are about to come. Luzhin locks himself in the bathroom. He breaks the window and crawls into the frame with difficulty. It remains only to let go of what he is holding on to, and he is saved. There is a knock on the door, the wife's voice is clearly heard from the next bedroom window: "Luzhin, Luzhin." The abyss below him splits into pale and dark squares, and he lets go of his hands.
The door was knocked down. "Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander Ivanovich?" roared several voices.
But there was no Alexander Ivanovich.
Retold
Luzhin's Defense is the third novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which was written in Berlin in emigration conditions. Passion embodied in chess
The plot concerns the main character, Sasha Luzhin, who, being still a little boy, was always in the center of especially cruel attention from his peers. As a child, he was deprived of attention and understanding from his parents, and was subject to abuse from his peers, and, as a rule, was sullen in face and behavior. He had no friends.
During one
The musical evening for the boy's aunt, who was his mother's second cousin, teaches him one of the simple lessons of playing chess. This incident motivates him to devote all his time to chess. He is less and less at school, and more and more visits his aunt to learn the basics of chess.
He is rapidly growing to the level of a great player, participating in all kinds of tournaments and reaching higher ranks in the chess world. He receives one of the highest ranks after only nine years. For a long time he has been one of the best representatives of the chess environment, but he has failed to join the ranks of the world champions.
Finding maternal care
Having matured, he remained socially unadapted and dispersed. During his stay at one of the resorts where chess tournaments were held, he finds himself involved in getting to know a young girl whose interest he captures. A romantic relationship is struck between them, as a result of which Luzhin invites her to marry him.
The girl agrees to marry him, despite long protests from her parents. The girl was initially fascinated by the mystery hovering around the chess player's lifestyle.
Breakdown
The situation is worsened by the fact that he, ahead of everyone else, must play a game with Turati, who was one of the Italian grandmasters, at the tournament it is necessary to hear which of them will be told that he is the reigning world champion.
Luzhin is overwhelmed by a state of aggravating mental imbalance, reaching a critical point when Turati overcame a pre-planned defense, and as a result, the game does not allow determining the winner. When the game ends in a draw, Luzhin wanders the streets of the city, overwhelmed by his detachment from reality.
After that, a long period is described, during which he gradually recovers. The doctor convincingly asks his wife to eliminate the chess reason for the decline in emotional and physical strength, and everything reminiscent of chess is removed from the area of \u200b\u200bhis stay. She plays a motherly role in this union to guard and protect the spouse's mind, destroyed by a pernicious obsession with chess.
Life or play
Chess still manages to return the master's attention to itself (through random incidents, for example, he accidentally found an old pocket chessboard in his coat, or a fragment of an unsuccessful chess game in feature film). He depicts his life as a chess game, analyzing the games played again and again, exacerbates manifestations of obsession. He resumes a desperate search for a move, designed to prevent him from losing the victory in the game, and therefore in life.
He decides that the main technique of his defense should be a special planned performance of an absurd, unexpected for the enemy action, which will fall out of life's regularity, and will introduce confusion into how the enemy planned to combine moves.
In the end, after meeting his guide in the world of chess, Alexander decides that he should "give up the game," as he put it to his wife trying to talk to her husband. He closes in the bathroom, knocks out the window, after which all those present, invited to the house, try to reach him. He climbs onto the windowsill. Having broken down the door, everyone discovered that Alexander Luzhin was no longer there.
The formation of this character is inspired by the image of the master with whom the author was personally acquainted; his end of life also followed a jump from the window. The writer, some time after publication, called this creation the story of a chess player who was crushed.
in. V. Nabokov and his novel "protection of Luzhin"
This is one of Nabokov's most striking novels. His genre is perfectly sustained - before us is a novel in the full sense of the word.
The romantic aspect of the genre content is determined by the subject of the image: it is the fate of a private person, traced throughout his life - from childhood to maturity, to a strange illness, when the hero's life ends. The fact that the subject of the image is the fate of the personality is also emphasized by a kind of circular composition.
The novel begins with the acquisition of a surname: "Most of all he was struck by the fact that from Monday he will be Luzhin" - the parents send the boy to school, where teachers and comrades will call him by his last name.
In the last lines of the novel, at the moment of suicide, the hero acquires a name and patronymic (during the novel's action he was only Luzhin):
“The door was knocked down. "Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander Ivanovich!" roared several voices. But there was no Alexander Ivanovich ”35.
In general, a feature of Nabokov's artistic world is that the characters lack a name and surname: the reader does not know the name of Luzhin's wife, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, although many minor characters, like, say, some of Luzhin's schoolmates, are named by their last names.
The plot of the novel is a dramatic story of the coexistence of two realities: reality in all social and everyday circumstances, on the one hand, and the world of the chess game, which is much more attractive for the hero, on the other. The flow of the novel action, as it were, in two dimensions is due to one of the characteristic features of the artistic consciousness of the 20th century - the transfer of attention from the objective side of reality, which was characteristic of realism of the 19th century, when the novel sought to reproduce it as accurately as possible, to become a greater reality than reality itself , on her subjective perception of the hero.
Subjectivization of the narrative, orientation towards the consciousness of the hero - this is the artistic principle of the author of Luzhin's Defense. Only thanks to this technique it becomes possible to show how the hero dramatically balances between reality and the chessboard, which increasingly replaces reality. This problematic is due to the special type of personality that Nabokov placed at the center of the novel. This is a person with a closed and deep type of consciousness. In terms of his psychological makeup, he is an introvert (a person immersed in himself), approaches the type of autist, has autistic thinking.
“Autists,” reflects the modern philosopher and culturologist V. P. Rudnev, “can be of two types - authoritarian; these are, as a rule, the founders and leaders of new directions (II. S. Gumilev, A. Schoenberg, V. Ya. Bryusov); defensive (that is, with a predominantly defensive rather than aggressive attitude); such was, for example, F. Kafka - defenseless, afraid of women, of his father, unsure of himself and of the quality of his works, but in his own way extremely whole. "
This psychological type becomes the subject of study of the culture of the XX century, its kind of discovery. Autism is not considered a mental illness, on the contrary, it can be a consequence of the genius of its carrier. It is this autistic type of consciousness with a defensive (defensive) attitude that makes Nabokov the subject of depiction in his novel.
At the very beginning of the novel, in describing the school where Luzhin is studying, the writer emphasizes his frank inattention to what constitutes the subject of the vital interests of his peers. He is a stranger to noisy boyish games in the schoolyard at a big break, has no friends, and his father's attempts to introduce him to the children of his friends are terrifying and very unpleasant. Luzhin is lonely and is not burdened by this loneliness, he always turns his back on his peers, having no idea what to talk about with them. Even the quiet man, which is in every class, avoids his company.
“The same quiet man, who received the St. George Cross six years later for his most dangerous intelligence, and then lost his hand during the civil wars, trying to remember (in the twenties of this century) what Luzhin was at school, could not imagine him otherwise than from the back , now sitting in front of him in the classroom, with his ears spread wide, now leaving to the end of the room, away from the noise, now leaving home in a cab - his hands in his pockets, a big piebald knapsack on his back, snow is falling ... "
The realm of reality turns out to be fundamentally boring and uninteresting for the hero, it only causes him to leave, hide, interact with it only for the purpose of self-defense, while chess is the real interest of his life. Sixty-four squares with incredibly intricate and varied intrigues of black and white figures become the real environment of the hero's bizarre inner life. His goal is to "relocate" from reality to the chess world: "Life with a hasty rustle passed by, and suddenly a stop - the cherished square, studies, openings, games." Explaining with his future mother-in-law, Luzhin, already a famous chess player, can in no way grasp the meaning of the conversation. On the floor in the living room, behind the play of shadows and sunbeams falling from the window, he sees strange chess combinations that require his intervention, say, "to take the shadow king away from the threat of the light pawn."
Life, as it were, in a different world, in a different dimension makes the hero deaf to the natural human feelings; does not allow the hero to experience what filial love or love for a woman is. He seems to be devoid of a moral imperative. He is detached from the world, does not know real problems, is inattentive to those close to him, and in general he hardly notices them. The death of his first chess partner, a florist, "a fragrant old man who smelled either of a violet or of a lily of the valley, depending on the flowers he brought to his aunt," only insults and irritates him. The words of an aunt going to the funeral: “Your old partner is dead. Let's go with me "- they offend the future grandmaster:" He got angry that he couldn't sit in the warmth, that it was snowing, that his aunt was burning sentimental tears behind a veil, - and turning sharply, he walked away and, after walking for an hour, went home. "
The death of his mother leaves him just as indifferent - it is given only through the prism of Luzhin's distant consciousness, watching with distrust his father's hysteria. The son's moral, human deafness, as his father perceives his immersion in his own world closed to others, amazes the elder Luzhin. Having conceived a novel about a brilliant son, “he decided firmly - that he would not let this child grow up, would not make him that gloomy person who sometimes visited him in Berlin, answered questions in monosyllables, sat with his eyes closed, and left, leaving an envelope with money on the windowsill. " Idealizing and stylizing his son's childhood in accordance with the concept of a never-written novel, the writer Luzhin forgets how he “looked at the door with dull horror”, which cut off any attempts to talk with his young son, in a word, forgets that this was how his son was always.
Life, which takes place in a different dimension than ordinary, everyday, family, school, household, characterizes the hero from childhood. The fundamental incompatibility of the two spaces - real and chess - is revealed in an episode of a family drama, when a love triangle, whose sides are mother, father and aunt Luzhin, takes on a new development (aunt is expelled from home). Luzhin is not at all interested in the cause of the family scandal, he simply “disgustedly thought that everyone in the house had gone mad today ... From that day on, a seductive, mysterious toy appeared in his room, which he had not yet been able to use. From that day on, my aunt never came to visit them again. "
Such a flow of novel time, as it were, in two planes, two realities, in two spaces (real and chess, which is due to the hero's autistic thinking), the organization of the artistic space characterizes the novel consciousness of the 20th century. and correlates with the theory of chronotope MM Bakhtin. The specificity of Nabokov's novel is that the consciousness of the hero forms its own chronotope, opposing the real chronotopes. There are also several of them in the novel. The first one is for children, connected with a summer residence, with summer, with a cozy house, a veranda, a garden, a forest; from him the hero is pulled out by the terrible news that "from Monday he will be Luzhin." The second is school, cruel and terrible for the hero, full of dangers and resentments. One of these grievances is his father's book, torn apart by his classmates, about school boys with the main character Antosha, who is honest, strong and loving animals. Pages of a tattered book were scattered throughout the class: “One was a picture of a clear-eyed schoolboy on a street corner feeding a shabby dog \u200b\u200bwith his breakfast. The next day Luzhin found it neatly nailed with buttons to the inside of the desk lid. "
There is a chronotope of Petersburg, along the streets of which little Luzhin walks, later runs away from school to his aunt and an old flower-grower, or rather, not to them - this is the beginning of a hundred genuine, chess-like life, the basics of which they are able to reveal to him. The chronotope of émigré Berlin is given most vividly in the romance. It is associated with Luzhin's fiancee, his marriage, with his parents' house, which has preserved and recreated the image of leafy Russia with samovars and smiling popular prints in paintings. All these chronotopes, with the exception of the child, are rejected by the consciousness of the hero. Having traveled all over Europe in his chess life, he never saw its true space - architectural, historical, cultural, social. "The world that Luzhin once traveled around was not depicted on the map," and he only noticed "a vague chess cafe, which was always the same, whether it was in Rome, London or in the same innocent Nice ..."
The chronotopes of reality merge in the hero's consciousness into one common one, not subject to the usual everyday logic, devoid of real outlines, in which it is not causal relationships that rule, but the whimsical laws of associations of autistic consciousness. So, for example, the hero perceives unnecessary chores on the eve of the upcoming honeymoon:
“Luzhin was filming for a passport, and the photographer took him by the chin, turned his face slightly, asked him to open his mouth wider and drilled his tooth with an intense buzzing. The buzzing stopped, the dentist looked for something on the glass shelf, and when he found it he put a stamp on the passport ... "
“In a rudimentary jacket without one sleeve, Luzhin, who was being refreshed, stood sideways to the pier glass, and the bald tailor either ran chalk over his shoulders and back, then stuck pins into it, taking them out of his mouth with amazing dexterity, where, apparently, they naturally grew ".
The general background of life is fundamentally devoid of interest, and if it attracts the attention of the hero, it is only because it is fraught with danger, a strange and unsolved combination of chess moves, while the plan of an invisible and unknown opponent is unclear, therefore it is so difficult to find protection. The true chronotope of Luzhin's life turns out to be the ideal, invented world of chess. According to modern psychology, the idea that the world of ideas is primary in relation to the material world characterizes autistic thinking. For Luzhin, the primacy of the ideal is undoubted, he is even hindered by the complex outlines of beautiful chess pieces, leading the authenticity of the ideal life into unnecessary external details of soulless material. When Luzhin, already ill, finds a small marching chess set behind the lining of his jacket, he immediately, almost automatically, arranges the pieces in the position in which the game with Turati was interrupted.
"This arrangement took place almost instantly, and immediately the entire material side of the matter disappeared: the small board, opened in his palm, became intangible and weightless, the morocco melted into a pink haze, everything disappeared, except for the chess position itself, which is complex, acute, saturated with extraordinary possibilities." ...
Luzhin's true life forms the true chronotope of the novel, where a harmonious chess idea, harmony of coups, and a barely audible melody of the future composition are primary. By making the subject of the image the consciousness of his hero, Nabokov gets the opportunity to transform reality, relying on the laws of this consciousness, and thus solve many significant aesthetic problems. Among them are the principles of typification, the relationship between character and environment, which is interpreted as the problem of correlation between private and historical time, which is most important for the artistic consciousness of the 20th century.
The key problem for classical realism of the 19th century is the problem of the correlation between the personality and the environment, the hero and social circumstances, in the 20th century. turned into a dramatic dialectic of the correlation between the private life of an individual and historical time, often fierce and aggressive towards a person. In an effort to avoid his influence, Nabokov decides for himself the question of his attitude to realism (and decisively breaks with it), asserts a concept of personality that is new for Russian literature, new ideas about the writer's creative and socially significant social tasks. The question of the attitude of the individual to historical time worries not only Nabokov, but also his heroes. Reflecting on the composition of his future novel, Luzhin's father, a mediocre writer, formulates this literary and aesthetic problem that torments him.
“Now, almost fifteen years later,” he reflects in exile. - these years of war turned out to be an irritating hindrance, it was some kind of encroachment on the freedom of creativity, because in any book that described the gradual development of a certain human personality, one should somehow mention the war, and even the death of a hero in his youth could not be a solution from the situation ... With the revolution it was even worse. By all accounts, she influenced the course of life of every Russian; it was impossible to pass the hero through it without living in him, it was impossible to avoid it. This was already a genuine violence against the will of the writer. "
However, Nabokov himself, in a paradoxical way, manages to overcome what his hero interprets as "genuine violence against the will of the writer" - the painful conditioning of fate and character by the historical process. He chooses a hero who will become a like-minded person of his creator. To remain outside reality, not to notice it, to replace the harmony of life with the harmony of chess moves - this is where the will of the writer and the brilliant grandmaster Luzhin coincide (whose prototype was the great Russian grandmaster Alekhin). Reality - peace, light, life, revolution, war, emigration, love - ceases to exist, crumpled, repressed, destroyed by the attack of white figures. The world turns into a mirage, in which the shadows of the real chess life of Grandmaster Luzhin appear: in the living room on the floor there is a slight, noticeable condensation of chess pieces to him alone - an inappropriate differentiation of shadows, and far from where he is sitting, a new combination appears on the floor. A kind of reduction of reality takes place: the harmony of nature is supplanted by the harmony of inevitable and optimal moves that provide excellent defense in the game with the main opponent of Luzhin, the grandmaster Turati, and the game loses its shape, turns into life itself, more and more reminiscent of the most complex and dramatic world of 64 cells. Explaining to his beloved, "he sat, leaning on a cane, and thought that with this linden standing on an illuminated slope, it was possible, with a knight's move, to take that telegraph pole over there, and at the same time tried to remember what exactly he was talking about" ...
Luzhin's Defense is a complex metaphoric novel, saturated with many semantic shades. This is a chess defense of black pieces before a crushing attack by white. But this is also a defense - or rather, an unsuccessful search for it - from the destructive onslaught of reality, the desire to fence off the chessboard from an incomprehensible and terrible world, reduce its laws to the laws of knights, kings, pawns; in the intricacies of life to see combinations of figures, the repetition of the most diverse combinations. An exhausting duel with the Italian grandmaster Turati leads to the fact that Luzhin falls ill: the world of reality loses all meaning and rational order for him, appears as hostile chaos, and a chessboard becomes fit for life, possessing genuine logic and everyday life.
This disease is the culmination of the novel and its kind of tipping point. Before the decisive fight with Turati, Luzhin completely loses his ability to orient himself in his hotel room. He wakes up in his Berlin hotel room, already dressed, even in a coat. Realizing that he needed to track to the tournament, “he quickly unlocked the door and stopped in bewilderment. According to him, there should have been a chess hall right away, and his table, and Turati, who was waiting. Instead, there was an empty corridor and further down the stairs. " A simple transition from a hotel room to another building where the duel hall is located (“this is exactly a minute of walking”) turns out to be an overwhelming task for a grandmaster who is absorbed in chess and has forgotten reality. In essence, Luzhin moves into the world of sixty-four cells, and the subject of the image in the novel becomes his consciousness, which rejects reality and perceives the world as an annoying hindrance that interferes with the real, chess life.
And life accepts the laws of chess, imposed on it by Grandmaster Luzhin! But the more terrible is the revenge of reality for the attempt to leave, to hide in the cell of the tournament hall. Tormented and crushed by the fight with Turati, unable to think out and finish the interrupted game, Luzhin, who found himself on a night Berlin street, forgets where he is, where he needs to go, where his hotel is. From this moment on, the action of the novel begins, as it were, a new development, returning to the plot, to the drama of acquiring a name. Desperately wandering through Berlin at night, Luzhin begins to search and suddenly almost recognizes the topographic signs that marked his escape from the station on the day he left for the city from his dacha after the last preschool summer. His wanderings are as desperate, helpless and fruitless as that child's escape. From the Berlin chronotope, he tries to return to the chronotope of childhood, when he was not yet Luzhin. In a Berlin park, he finds a path along which he ran to save himself, then he sits down, resting, dreams of the appearance of a manor, almost sees the familiar bridge and the miller's dacha: “He knew that the manor was somewhere nearby, but he approached “He’s approaching her from an unfamiliar side, and so it was all difficult ...” Crushed by illness and triumphant pain, unconscious, picked up by drunken sympathetic Germans celebrating the anniversary of school graduation, Luzhin finds himself in the bride's house.
From this point on, the external plot of the novel appears to be very simple. Doctors forbid chess, a doctor with an “agate look” instills in him that “there is a free and bright world all around, that playing chess is cold fun that dries and corrupts thought ...“ I will stop loving you, ”said the bride,“ if you you will remember chess, and I see every thought, so hold on. " “Horror, suffering, despondency,” the doctor said quietly, “that's what this exhausting game creates.” Luzhin is gradually "recovering", a wedding is being prepared, which horrifies the bride's parents. Household chores before and after marriage, furnishing an apartment, preparing a honeymoon trip occupy the outer plan of the novel. The inner plan, associated with the hero's dramatic struggle, which he wages with reality, a plan invisible and incomprehensible to anyone, develops much more whimsical and dramatic. It is he who forms the inner plot of the second part of the novel - after the game with Turati, which has not been played out and was postponed forever.
The essence of this inner plot is made up of the fateful inevitability of the recurring events of the first part of the novel, which mark the departure of the protagonist from reality into his own real, chess world. Details, plots, symbols, faces, episodes of Luzhin's previous life are repeated with inexorable sequence. On one of the evenings, an absolutely impossible schoolmate Petrishchev meets, recalling an accidentally torn apart book, and Luzhin begins to understand “that“ the combination is even more complicated than he thought at first, that meeting with Petrishchev is just a continuation of something, and that one needs to look deeper, return back, replay all the moves of life, from illness to ball. " From that moment on, all the events of his life were perceived by Luzhin as something part of a strange chess combination, "an intricate repetition of moves recorded in childhood."
“Vaguely admiring and vaguely horrified, he traced how scary, how sophisticated, how flexibly the images of his childhood (and the estate, and the city, and the school, and the Petersburg aunt) were repeated during this time, step by step, but still did not quite understand than this combination repetition is so terrible for his soul. "
Everything is repeated. Trying to somehow deceive the unknown enemy, Luzhin tries to make unexpected and incomprehensible "moves" himself: he tells his wife that he needs to see the dentist, he himself gets out of the taxi just around the corner and makes an unintentional walk through the streets. With such an unexpected act - "a move" he deceives his opponent - and immediately realizes that it was once before, not now, in Berlin, but in childhood, in St. Petersburg. Wanting to get away from the terrible repetition of the combination and outwit the unknown enemy, he turns into the first store he comes across.
“The store turned out to be a hairdresser's, and a ladies' one. Luzhin, looking around, stopped, and the smiling woman asked him what he wanted. "Buy ..." said Luzhin, continuing to look around. Then he saw a wax bust and pointed to it with a cane (unexpected move, magnificent move). " However, he immediately realizes with horror that "the look of the wax lady, her pink nostrils - that was also once."
This is how the image of an aunt reappears in the novel, who revealed chess to the future grandmaster, and this is the last move in a combination that is being played by someone or something against the hero - the last move before checkmate is made. This moment is associated with the appearance in front of his house of a former entrepreneur, a certain Valentinov, now a cinematic producer. The harsh logic of the newly played life combination manifests itself before Luzhin's consciousness: “The key has been found. The aim of the attack is clear. By relentless repetition of moves, it leads again to the same passion that destroys the dream of life. Desolation, horror, madness. "
Reality - a kind of mystical beginning for the modernist - no longer accepts the rules of the game, other than those that were imposed on it earlier. Luzhin suddenly notices with horror in the most ordinary, seemingly everyday things and events, the irrepressible attack of real life with the inexorable repetition of chess moves in it, the strict mathematical logic of the game, which, being a surrogate of the world, did not stop for a minute. Luzhin's defense was powerless against this attack! "A game? We will play?" - with fright and affectionately asks the wife a few minutes before Luzhin's suicide, unaware of this endless, exhausting game of her husband, started by him against reality itself. The position of the person who has entered into such a game is tragic, and Nabokov finds a magnificent image to portray this tragedy.
In life, in dreams and in reality, "stretched all the same sixty-four squares, a great board, in the middle of which, shivering and completely naked, Luzhin stood, as tall as a pawn, and peered into the obscure arrangement of huge figures, hunchbacked, big-headed, crowned."
This is how a writer looks like a person who is unable to enter into a dialogue with reality, understand and accept it, which is more complicated than ever. Thus, Nabokov approaches the problematic that was comprehended by M. Gorky in the four-volume epic The Life of Klim Samgin. In both cases, the center of the narrative is the hero, afraid of life, fleeing from it, trying to hide from the pernicious influences of reality behind a "system of phrases," like Samghin, or behind a chessboard, like Luzhin ...
Of course, Luzhin is not Samghin, he is childishly frank and helpless, childishly devoted to the game. These heroes are faced with completely different life and historical situations and, on completely different grounds, come to reject reality. However, in the typological, abstract plane there are coincidences. The fundamental rejection of reality by Nabokov's hero is not an accidental whim of the author, but a thoughtful life and creative position, courageously defended, which has become a program of personal and literary behavior. If you like, this is one of the attempts to preserve the sovereignty of the human person, its right to independence from the circumstances of time, including historical time, the aggressiveness of which in relation to the private life of a person in the 20th century. became especially evident.
CHAPTER 1 CONCLUSIONS
The translation activity of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is unique in the sense that he translated not only European literature into Russian, the West also owes him translations into English (partly into French, which the author also mastered perfectly) by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev; he also translated his own works, and his auto-translations are a topic worthy of a separate detailed study.
Having graduated from one of the most expensive educational institutions in Russia - the Tenishevsky School, having received a doctorate in French and Russian literature at the University of Cambridge, Nabokov is as erudite as few others in his literary generation, and is unusually careful in translating the text. Comparison of Nabokov's translations of different years reveals not only the formation of the artist's skill, but also the change in his attitude to the problem of literary translation.
As a translator, Nabokov tried himself at the age of 22: he wrote the first poetic translation from O'Sullivan, and at the same time, in an argument with his father, he took up the translation from the French of Romain Rolland's book Cola Brunion. He also makes a translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, published in 1923: “L. Carrol. Anya in Wonderland. Translation from English by V. Sirin "(under the pseudonym Sirin, most of Nabokov's works written during his life in Europe are published).
Nabokov also translated poetry and for 10 years (from 1922 to 1932) published translations from Rupert Brook, Ronsard, Verlaine, Superviel, Tennyson, Yates, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Musset, Rimbaud, Goethe. In 1937, the Nabokovs moved from Nazi Germany to Paris, where the writer published translations on french poems by Pushkin.
The translations made by Nabokov reflect the writer's many-sided interests and his amazing talent for translating, "implanting" into cultures of different times and peoples. At the request of Sergei Rachmaninoff, he makes a reverse translation of Poe's poem "Bells" into English from the Russian translation of Konstantin Balmont: the original text of the poem did not fit into the music of the romance. Here, Nabokov had to take care, first of all, of the accurate transmission of the acoustic side of the text, sacrificing for this the ideological and semantic content. Translates into english language several poems by Vladislav Khodasevich, preceding them with a short preface. Together with Edmund Wilson he translates Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri"; later, in 1945, the book "Three Russian Poets" was published in English (translations from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev). Then he works on the translation into English of the text of M. Yu. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time".
Nabokov thought about how to translate several times throughout his creative life, and his views have undergone significant changes over the years. Created in America, where he emigrated in 1940, translations from the Russian language are made in a completely new manner. By this time, the writer comes to the conviction that a literary work (both prosaic and poetic) should be translated only "literally" - with an accurate reproduction of the context, when the subtlest nuances and intonations of the original text are conveyed.
The late, English-speaking Nabokov in his translations becomes an ever greater adherent of elite literature, raising the requirements for his own work, creating a lot of difficulties, subjecting to a serious test the patience, goodwill, and will of an intrigued amateur reader.
The history of Nabokov's translation activity is inextricably linked with the difficult internal restructuring of the writer in the process of his formation as an English-speaking writer. In 1939, after many years in emigration, realizing that he would never return to his homeland, Nabokov wrote a poem "Towards Russia", in which, in the words of Zinaida Shakhovskaya, he "renounces pain ... from despair." From that moment on, a new period began in the work of Nabokov. He stops writing about Russia, at least in Russian. Several years later, he would give up his native language altogether for a long time.
In 1965, prominent émigré critic Vladimir Fedorovich Markov and the American poet Merrim Sparke prepared an anthology of Russian poetry translated into English with parallel Russian texts. Markov turned to Nabokov for permission to include two of his poems: "No matter what kind of battle canvas ..." and "What a bad deed I have done ...". But first it was necessary to make a literary translation of these works into English. Nabokov refused to do the translation, entrusting this work to Markov: apparently, he still felt like a Russian poet. However, Nabokov found the finished translations "unsatisfactory." And since he himself did not intend to translate them, in a letter addressed to Markov, Nabokov's wife, on behalf of her husband, asked not to include his poems in the collection. But ten days after this letter, Nabokov still translates the poems into English, thereby forcing himself to make the transition from his native language to English.
V. Nabokov's novel "Luzhin's Defense", a summary of which we present to your attention, was released in 1930. According to many critics, this work brought the author to the vanguard of the Russian literary community, which worked in emigration.
In bright, but somewhat gloomy colors, Nabokov describes the life vicissitudes of a talented chess player, for whom the world around him has become a mirror image of a chess game.
Farewell to childhood
Every summer little Sasha Luzhin spends with his parents at the dacha, and in the fall the family returns to St. Petersburg, to their city apartment. This year in the life of the boy, who was still in the care of a French governess, unexpected changes must occur: his father announced to Sasha that he was going to go to school. This news frightens the quiet home boy. His imagination paints the horrors of the future daily communication with peers. Thus begins the story of the fate of the future genius in the book, on the cover of which there is a laconic inscription: "V. Nabokov." Luzhin's Defense "". The summary of the first few chapters tells about the childhood experiences of the young hero.
When the Luzhin family, at the end of the summer season, having collected the necessary things, prepares to leave for the city, Sasha runs away into the forest right from the railway station. The frozen rain drives the little stubborn to the village house. The boy hides in the attic in the hope that no one will find him there. Among the usual attic rubbish, Sasha notices an old chessboard, not yet suspecting what role this object will play in his future life. Soon, the adults find the fugitive, and the black-bearded miller carries the boy in his arms to the road carriage. Parting with childhood illusions could be called this part of the novel "Luzhin's Defense". A summary of the chapters of the entire work acquaints the reader with the feelings of a vulnerable teenager, a focused youth and an adult man.
School grudges and parental misunderstandings
Relations with classmates, which Sasha feared, did not work out for him. At first, the boys tease him with Antosha by the name of a character in one of the stories of Luzhin Sr., who was writing children's books. Sasha prefers not to notice sharp jokes in his address, he withdraws into himself. Soon everyone forgets about him, looks at him as an empty space.
If we had to write a short essay on the topic: “V. Nabokov: "Luzhin's Defense", a summary, analysis of the work and the characteristics of the protagonist ", then one could say with confidence: the isolation and unsociability of the teenager were the very same protection from the encroachments of society on his inner world. It is easy to verify the validity of this statement by continuing to read the novel.
The father, who visited the gymnasium a month later to learn about his son's successes, hears from the teacher that the boy, although not without abilities, is too lethargic and lacking in initiative. Sasha did not show success in studying school subjects, in conversations with his parents on the topic of study he preferred to remain silent, sometimes he had outbursts of unmotivated anger. The father begins to suspect that the only son is sick with some kind of mental illness, but still hopes that the boy has a great future.
Introduction to the world of chess
On the anniversary of the death of Sasha's maternal grandfather, a musical evening is organized in the Luzhins' house, since the deceased old man was considered a good composer. One of the invited musicians, whom Sasha accidentally ran into in his father's office, in a short conversation rave about the game of chess, calling it "the hobby of the Gods." It is known that Vladimir Nabokov himself was fond of the art of drawing up chess studies. "Luzhin's Defense" is a summary of his views on this ancient game, its influence on human destinies.
The next day, when the boy's mother starts a quarrel with his father, suspecting her husband of treason, Sasha retires into his office again. Here is also the mother's second cousin, who is visiting the Luzhins' house. It was this woman who caused the scandal between the parents. The boy asks his aunt to teach him how to play chess. The girl denies it on the pretext that training may take too long. The boy insists on his own, and with a sigh the aunt shows how to arrange the pieces, explains the rules for their movement on the chessboard. At first glance, the events in the novel "The Defense of Luzhin", a summary of which we are trying to convey, develop slowly and quite routinely.
Youth protest
One day Sasha watches his classmates play chess. Unexpectedly for himself, the boy discovers that, not knowing how to play, he understands much more in this magical action than his peers. At this moment, a plan is ripening in his head, and Sasha begins to implement his plans the next morning. In the plot of the novel "Luzhin's Defense", a summary of which cannot contain many important details, one of the climaxes comes.
Pretending to go to school, the boy stops attending classes, spending his days at the house of his second aunt. A young woman gives him his first chess lessons. Then an old man, who often visits his aunt, begins to teach Sasha. Parents soon find out about school truancy, and scandals break out in the house again. But Sasha no longer worries, he enthusiastically studies magazines, playing chess games on them.
The first losses and the beginning of a chess career
A week later, young Luzhin learns about the death of the old man, from whom he took game lessons. This news weighs heavily on the boy's fragile psyche. Parents are forced to take Sasha abroad to provide treatment for a prolonged nervous breakdown.
After some time, the mother returns to Russia, Sasha stays with his father. Luzhin Sr. often appears in company with a young lady, in which the boy recognizes his second aunt. Soon a telegram arrives from Petersburg announcing the death of Sasha's mother.
The father, imbued with his son's hobby for chess, allows him to participate in various tournaments. A growing young man wins one victory after another, this occupation begins to bring not only fame, but also money. The organization of chess matches and simultaneous play sessions is handled by a specially involved person - Mr. Valentinov.
Life in exile and marriage
The First World War and the October Revolution force the Luzhin family to finally settle abroad, they settle in Berlin. In 1928, Luzhin Sr. recalls his long-standing idea to write a book about a talented young man who died early. The details of the work are carefully thought out, but something prevents the implementation of this plan. It soon turns out that the failed author himself did not have long to live: as a result of a severe cold, he develops a lung disease, which entailed a sudden death.
Young Luzhin, having turned into a sullen man with a heavy hunched figure, continues his chess career. All his games come to the end with an invariable victory, in the near future he hopes to win the champion title. While preparing for one of the most important tournaments, Alexander meets a Russian girl from an emigrant family. The young woman considers Luzhin a real genius and soon, despite the protests of her parents, she marries him.
Mixing game with reality
The invincible chess player manages to leave far behind all rivals. But this tournament should be decisive in a dispute with a long-time opponent - a grandmaster from Italy named Turati. The fight for many hours is interrupted, and without revealing the winner, the position on the chessboard portends a draw.
This difficult game completely exhausts Luzhin's strength, which leads to another nervous breakdown and a prolonged illness. On the recommendation of the doctor, his wife seeks to erase all memories of chess from Alexander's memory, she tries to make sure that no attributes of the game come across to him. But in the fevered brain of a chess player, episodes of real life are firmly intertwined with chess etudes.
Valentinov, about whom nothing has been heard for the past few years, reminds of himself with a phone call, asks for a meeting with Luzhin. The wife, referring to Alexander's illness, denies Valentinov his request. The spouses' immediate plans are to move to another city, and before that visit their father's grave. Here we begin to guess why Nabokov gave this name to his work - "Luzhin's Defense". A summary of the chapters of this novel brings us closer to the denouement of the plot.
All the thoughts of a chess genius are occupied with the analysis of an unfinished game. In his imagination, chess pieces take on the images of people he has ever met, and game moves are associated with the actions of others or his own actions. In Luzhin's head, plans are being built for an impenetrable defense against enemy attacks. The chess player is sure that only an unexpected, even an absurd move can break the opponent's tactics. At the same time, chess strategy is carried over to events in the real world.
The agonizing search for the right move
One day, leaving the city, accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law, Luzhin leaves them under the pretext of having to visit the dentist. He wanders the streets, enters various establishments, as if entangling his tracks. He understands that in all these actions there is nothing new, his every move is known to the chess opponent, so victory cannot be achieved. Luzhin's defense is a summary of the life strategy that a person with a disturbed psyche associates with playing chess.
Approaching his house, Luzhin meets his old acquaintance Valentinov at the entrance. He puts the man in the car and takes him to the film studio, where he now works. Valentinov is trying to persuade Luzhin to star in a feature film with the participation of real chess players. Alexander feels that shooting is just an excuse to drag him into a losing game, to force him to make a wrong move.
Ingenious solution to complex multi-movement
Luzhin arrives home, with difficulty climbs to the top floor. He begins to walk quickly through the rooms of the apartment, despite the requests of his crying wife to stop and explain the essence of what is happening. Finally, Luzhin finishes his marathon, lays the contents of his pockets on the nightstand and kisses his wife's hands. “The only right move has been found! You just need to leave the game, drop out of it! " - such a thought illuminates the inflamed imagination of a chess genius.
Guests are invited to the house this evening. The first doorbell rings, the maid runs to open, the wife goes to greet the newcomer. Taking advantage of the moment, Luzhin locks himself in the bathroom. Along the shelves of the chest of drawers standing here, Alexander climbs onto the sill of a high window. Dangling his legs outside, he deeply breathes in the frosty air. The door shudders under the onslaught of people, the worried voice of his wife is clearly audible. But the chess player has nothing to do with this. He prepared to make the last move, leading to victory and unlimited freedom. A minute later, the bathroom door was knocked out, but there was no one to save.
This is how the last chapter of the novel ends, the plot of which contains a description of a whole life, and the title does not differ in particular ornateness (but the author, V. Nabokov, decided so) - "Luzhin's Defense". Reviews about this work can be summarized and expressed in just one phrase: not everyone can withstand the burden of genius. But this is not the fault, but the misfortune of people endowed with exceptional talents. Is not it?
"All life is a game" - how much sense in this popular phrase. Life can be seen as a theater in which everyone plays their part. But there may be another interpretation of this phrase, when a person devotes his whole life to the game. A similar situation happened with the protagonist of the novel "The Defense of Luzhin" by Vladimir Nabokov. This work is one of the most famous in his work, which tells about the dark sides of the human soul and mind.
Alexander Luzhin was an unusual boy from childhood. He was aloof, incomprehensible and incomprehensible either to his family or classmates. He experienced bullying at school, did not study well, as if he lived in his own world. To cope with stress and not overplay the misunderstanding of others, he found a way out in playing chess. He completely surrendered himself to the game, forgetting about reality. It was so interesting and exciting: a lot of variations and combinations of moves, thinking over which you can spend as much time as you want.
Luzhin became an excellent chess player, but gradually his fear of losing took possession of him too much. He saw fate as his rival, which over and over again makes its move. Neither his wife, nor anyone else from the entourage could cure Luzhin of this disease, which soon took possession of his consciousness completely.
The book can be compared to a chessboard in which all characters become pieces on the field. And at the same time, the game is comparable to a cage. At first, it was freedom for Luzhin, an opportunity to escape from negative emotions in real life, but then the game became a cage from which he could not get out. He seemed to see what was happening outside, but he could not leave the playing field either. And he found his way out of this situation.
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