Book Review: The Defense: Vladimir Nabakov

Soooo... I have a theory. It is only a theory... it is untested... unvarnished... unwashed but as the years go by I become more and more confident of it’s validity. Now this is important and I want you to pay attention. The theory is this. You should read Russian authors during February in the midwest. Last year around this time I wrote about seasonal affective disorder...SAD. Makes me sad even to think about it but the idea is that due to gray..clouds...rain...cold... that we get depressed. We get sad... we get...affected. I know it is true for me and as I get older it becomes truer... or more truer which is how I would write about it in a legal brief. I am not certain if it is the most truest... only time will tell.

But back to the Russians. If you read, and enjoy reading ultimately you must confront the Russians. Like the Germans on the eastern front in all the wars we eventually lost, there are always the Russians. They live in a bleak landscape that we cannot appreciate. Whether living under Tsars (Czars?) or Communist rule or “democracy” or oligarchs or... or Putin. The Russians are always there, always writing and their great writers are VERY hard to avoid.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin and later Vladmir Nabokov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn these guys have written some great shit (now that is some good commentary). And you hear about them but then you go to the book store or the library and look at “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina” or “Crime and Punishment” and you think, why do they need a thousand pages to tell a story? It is a good question and though I have fought my way through two of those, “Crime and Punishment” still eludes me. If that speaks poorly of me, so be it. “War and Peace” was a battle but I must confess “Anna Karenina” was a lengthy, hard fought pleasure.

The Russians combine attention to detail, a strong sense of irony, a bleakness as well as a sense of culture that makes them unparalleled in English literature. Maybe Maugham wrote about about people better but, I doubt it. The Russians understood bleakness and madness and above all irony. Russian political history and Russian winters breeded these awful little men who wrote about love, war, death and especially madness and mental illness. They love those two topics and they don’t just write about it... they caress it and nurture it. It is the Russians. they must be read, they must be studied, they do not have to be loved but they must be appreciated.

The key thing to remember is that you do not have to read the 100 page monsters in order to get a taste for these guys. They all have short stories and novellas and reasonably long books to while away some winter reading time. So for February I decided to light a big fire, enjoy our first big, big snow (or maybe the second) and hunker down and read Nabakov’s “The Defense”. Nabakov has a bad rap with a lot of people because of “Lolita” and while “Lolita” is a deeply troubled book about two deeply troubled characters and their deeply troubling romance and abusive relationship... it is beautifully written and is more a book about obsession and self defeat then about pedophila.

But we are hear to discuss “The Defense”. I thought maybe it was a war book or a legal book but it turns out it is a chess book about a sullen kid in Russia who is a chess prodigy and while it sounds boring this guy writes so well it is compelling. Almost from page one where we meet the spoiled kid, neurotic mother and disappointed father. The thing about Nabakov is that he writes so beautifully and in such detail that when he writes about a kid playing chess... it is compelling. When he writes about the kids father having an affair with the kids aunt... it is beautiful and it makes you think about how you feel and that is something most writers cannot even come close to.

There is something compelling about prodigies. Kids who are prodigies are like idiot savants and they amaze and delight with their gifts while generally stumbling through troubled dysfunctional lives on many levels and this story of the child Luzhin (like illusion) and his invention of the “Luzhin Defense” is an interesting... troubling story. Written in 1930 you have to know what the author was doing to appreciate it’s brilliance. He was born to Russian nobility which had to flee the Russian army in 1919 moving to the Crimea and ultimately at this point to Berlin. In 1922 his father had been assassinated while trying to shield a leader in the Russian Democratic movement. The author new some tragedy and it shows in this dark book.

Luhzin buries his parents and proceed with his chess career and then he meets his future wife and he takes us through courtship, engagement and ultimately marriage. In between Luhzin suffers a complete mental breakdown at the big tournament in Berlin in the final match against the Italian Turani and apparently gives up the game altogether and tries to become a normal husband and minor league rich guy Russian expatriate in berlin. Surprisingly... it does not work out. Nabakov move him along in rambling several page paragraphs which almost have a magical realism quality as he is constantly imagining himself in a chess game, mixing with the other pieces, making forays into new territory and ultimately being out played and falling into a trap. Which is how Luhzin and the book end. Beautiful.
Read the Russians and February and get that gun out of your mouth.