The View From Above

...Alas, Pnin, appearances to the contrary, is also a dark Nabokovian fiction in which the reader, through laughter, is drawn into the circle of those who mock and torment Pnin...

...In Nabokov's fiction the function (or in this case, absence) of a character's name is to point past itself to that "clear madness" (the phrase, yasnoe bezum'e, is taken from one of Nabokov's Russian poems) which in various forms possesses each of his heroes...

...In one sense there never was an Aleksandr Ivanovich, for these last lines are the first time that the reader learns Luzhin's given name...

...he at first says nothing and then, suddenly, replies: "Eighteen years, three months and four days.' If his courtship a rebours in which he succeeds by making all the wrong moves is a literary Chapliniad (in a hilarious mockery of the stereotype, his future fiancée runs after him to return the filthy handkerchief he has dropped), the scene in which the dazed Luzhin becomes involved with a group of tipsy Berliners is pure Keystone comedy...

...The character of Luzhin is based in part on that of the chess master Rubinstein and of another, lesser known master (Nabokov once worked as the chess editor of an emigre newspaper...

...The Defense, a short novel written in Russian by the young Nabokov in France during the summer of 1929, has as its protagonist a grand chess master named Luzhin...

...A bit of literary history is helpful here: The "real" Pnin was a minor Russian poet of the late 18th century, the bastard son of Prince Repnin (truncated names for illegitimate children were quite common at that time...

...When asked a polite question: "How long have you played chess...

...And that is precisely the problem—to read Nabokov requires a fine knowledge of almost all (Spanish is not absolutely essential) European literaturesc including our own...

...These patterns have a fascination which is quite independent of the people (or rather, figures) who participate in them...

...It is important beyond this because it is a cornerstone to all of Nabokov's writing wherein many important melodies and combinations of his art are made apparent...

...He is a former Wunderkind who has, however, never mastered those little gestures whose sum is society...

...In the pitiful and charming chess master Nabokov plots in extreme the unpierceable isolation of the individual...

...He sees only the more significant gestures or patterns through which the real course of life is played out...

...Petersburg house, and the large, cool hand resting on my head did not quaver, and several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on the board...

...And in Speak, Memory it is interesting to note how Nabokov uses a chess analogy when speaking of his own childhood and the death of his father: "But no shadow was cast by that future event upon the bright stairs of our St...

...Aleksandr Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich!' screamed several voices...

...But the comedy is the beginning of Luzhin's madness (the title of the French translation of the novel is La course de fou), and by the time Luzhin's chess promoter, a ubiquitous knave who has his counterparts in other novels, tries to involve him in the making of an actual movie, Luzhin understands chess so well that life itself becomes the abstraction to him and he can scarcely resolve the problem of how to leave a room...

...Not many do...

...It would not be too much to suggest that all of Nabokov's novels are, in essence, ironic, anti-Platonic propositions...

...Even the name then is both intrinsically funny and cruel...

...In the final scene Luzhin barricades himself in a room and hurls himself downward, imagining in that moment that eternity is a chessboard toward which he is falling...

...Again, there is in Nabokov—let us not forget his credentials as a natural scientist— as little or as much as the reader is capable of perceiving...

...His choice is an anti-Platonic one in which the illusion, chess, is consciously chosen over the reality, life (as if in confirmation of the cave allegory, shadows of people and objects in the novel do in fact give rise to chess combinations in Luzhin's mind...

...The 18th-century Pnin's best known work is "The Wail of Innocence," which concerns the fact of his illegitimacy, and Nabokov's Pnin, of course, in his frequent moments of great stress never cries, he always "wails...

...The poet Pnin was an outcast from society because his father would not grant him legal recognition, just as the fictional Pnin is a curiosity within society whom no one will "recognize" as a human being...

...Nor is Nabokov difficult only because of his Russian background: Western critics now strain under his "Russianness" just as emigre Russian critics in the '30s had to contend with his "Westernness...

...Luzhin's helplessness before life occasions an endless succession of comic scenes in which he either misunderstands or understands too precisely...

...But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich...

...Nabokov has always had a marked predilection for the view from above, and there is his own description of the "subliminal co-ordinates" by means of which a novel is "plotted...

...In fact, of course, Nabokov came to the United States by ship, and he brought with him not 40 pounds but many intellectual steamer trunks...

...To take but one example, perhaps the most frequently encountered cliché about Nabokov is that of the unique position within his work of Pnin, the novella about an eccentric Russian professor in America...

...The expression of his tenuous stance between the two realities is his acrophobia: Luzhin is terrified of heights, the third dimension which takes him beyond the chessboard...

...Pnin is another of Nabokov's heroes who, through eccentricity or abnormality, hover fitfully on the brink of society and sanity...

...If only, according to the anti-Nabokov, pro-Pnin critics, Nabokov would write more delightfully charming and human books like that one...

...Reviewed by ANDREW FIELD Editor, "Pages from Tarusa" An unusually malevolent review of Nabokov's Pale Fire—he is one of the few authors who regularly raise mediocre critics to true fury—asserted that Nabokov came to this country from Europe "with 40 pounds of intellectual luggage, to which he has since added nothing...

...His mental illness is brilliantly anticipated in scenes on balconies and staircases...

...When life intrudes upon and destroys his control of chess, Luzhin is put on the defensive and ends in flight from both sun and shadow...

...Luzhin was taught how to play by his father's lover, and the melodies and combinations of chess serve as a surrogate for life which is "not entirely comprehensible" to him...

...Yet, as in the instance of Pnin who is also made up of recognizable bits (of eccentric Russian professors in America), the entire fictional structure cannot be adequately perceived in terms of its elemental, real "pieces...

...The door was broken down...

...The Defense is Nabokov's finest short novel as well as his first work of real significance...

...We are able to understand him only to the degree that we are able to approach him culturally and intellectually...

...Luzhin is a Pnin-figure (his fiancée at one point calls him "absentminded like an old professor") in whom comedy has been made the handmaiden of tragedy...