The Defense

Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense. A chess prodigy from a very young age, he has a lifelong, inextricable relationship with the black-and-white game, earning him the highest title of grandmaster and an illustrious reputation for his board acumen among his contemporaries.

Memory is one of the most fundamental skills for the advanced chess player, as they must remember openings, consisting of several consecutive mechanical moves, along with variations and lines that might have been played in famous past games, whose final outcomes dictate the optimal move selection in the present. Grandmasters often remember thousands of complete chess board states from a space of possibilities larger than the number of individual air molecules in our atmosphere. And yet, Luzhin can barely remember the faces of the people closest to him, the name of his wife, and even his own past.

Nabokov weaves Luzhin’s inability to recall directly into his narration, providing a fragmented structure where abrupt time jumps, extremely long grammatical periods, and constant amnesia force the reader to experience Luzhin’s own disoriented state. The unique narration style adopted by the author closely mirrors the pace of a chess game, with slow, dragged and hard-to-follow sentences towards the beginning and middle of the book, replaced by fast-paced action and short, rapid-fire development only at the very end. Thus, for most of the novel, Nabokov is playing with the reader’s own memory: “Did I miss a period?” “How did we get here?” “I guess I will have to restart from the top!” These are recurring circumstances the reader finds themselves in upon reading the majority of The Defense, mirroring the emotional state of its protagonist.

Luzhin has “no other acquaintances” outside of his feared manager and antagonist Valentinov, has “never once cried”, and has never even “been to the movies”. His life revolves around sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces. “For what else exists in the world besides chess?” His mind occupied by the game, Luzhin chooses to push out of it the real world that surrounds him. And in so doing, he himself is neglected and forgotten in response: “[…] even the sole quiet boy in the class […] steered clear of him, afraid of sharing his despicable condition. The same quiet boy […] could not visualise him other than from the rear.” His homonymic father attempts to overwrite this solitary and ill-defined childhood with a book of fictionalised recollections, only to die before its completion. And not even the death of his father seems to distract him from his beloved game. In early conversations with his soon-to-be wife, she recounts how “she was puzzled that having lost his father only a month ago,” Luzhin can “reminisce coldly.” “His father’s death did not interrupt his work,” we learn shortly afterwards.

It is precisely in his relationships, particularly with his wife, that the theme of faulty memory makes itself most acutely felt. Neither Luzhin nor his wife, whose name is never found in the novel, seem to know much and ‘remember’ about the other. In fact, Luzhin’s name is only learnt in the very last sentence of the book, never to be spoken by Mrs Luzhin, his closest companion, as if she herself forgot it. Their relationship is never marked by shared memory, the two never feel the emotional presence of their partner, and Mrs Luzhin is increasingly concerned about her husband’s obsession with the cursed grid-shaped game: “Suddenly she realised what was up and began to debate with herself how to make Luzhin forget this unfortunate game of chess,” we learn from their conversation. There is bitter irony here: to save him, his wife must force him to forget the only thing he can remember (chess). She tries to build a normal life with him, but because he can barely retain any emotional memories (even her name), they are essentially strangers. Her desperate attempts to make him forget his fixation will ultimately fail, leading to his final emotional destruction.

It is one fatal, unforgettable and unfinished game that underpins Luzhin’s ultimate fall into the abyss. His confrontation with the Italian grandmaster Turati, from which he flees in fieri in an incoherent fit of hallucination, will never fully leave his memory. “And once he dreamt he saw Turati sitting with his back to him.” Luzhin cannot escape this ‘defeat’, the crumbling of his only certainty. He is constantly thinking about it, and at some point, he even “sets out the position […] at the point it had been interrupted.” But it is too late. His wife cannot save him. “The only way out,” he said. “I have to drop out of the game.”

Nabokov uses the fracturing of memory to chart Luzhin’s descent from chess prodigy to a man entirely disconnected from human reality. “Nobody seemed to know that a chess genius was present at the ball, a man whose name had been in millions of newspapers and whose games had already been called immortal.” The cost to Luzhin’s immortality on the chessboard is, after all, his anonymity amongst his closest connections, who ultimately forget him not only as a chess player, but most importantly as a friend and loved one.

“But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich.”