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Re: [Gorris and Chess] The text OnLine II
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Steve Norquist: "It certainly was a fine ending for "Luzhin." Jon Speelman is a well-known endgame specialist. Incidentally, if White does not play 47.gxh3, Black has ...Rh5 mate as well as ...h6 mate....[ ]Correction: The R mate only works if White moves the Bishop off of the d1-h5 diagonal."
JM: The movie moves away from Nabokov's original in several very important aspects - and the "fine ending" is certainly one of them. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Gorris's "The Luzhin Defence" enormously, probably because I'm blind to chess and an unreliable Nabokov reader to boot (not literally, of course, I hope).
In his foreword to the English edition of "The Defense," VN wrote: "Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' — which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely — but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius."
Nabokov's fondness for Luzhin is quite unlike Charles Kinbote's for John Shade: "His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." I could never warm towards this successful fictional poet, haunted by Kinbote and his inept efforts to impinge Zembla and Gradus upon him.
However, a "good reader" isn't expected to despise or love the characters in a novel, is he (she)? And I suppose it's all right if one loves its ghostly author in his plight against the world. As Nabokov teaches in "Speak, Memory" (290-91), when he associates art and chess: "It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world)."*
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* - Steve Norquist and Stan Kelly-Bootle, by sheer chance, while trying to find the S,M quote on line, I found another "VN chess problems" site:
The Nabokovian Problem - by Robert Tuohey - Past Pawns - chess ...
www.chessville.com/.../NabokovianProblem.htm -
(I managed to evade Jo Morgan's link on "Freudian Slips" in the nick of time!)
.
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JM: The movie moves away from Nabokov's original in several very important aspects - and the "fine ending" is certainly one of them. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Gorris's "The Luzhin Defence" enormously, probably because I'm blind to chess and an unreliable Nabokov reader to boot (not literally, of course, I hope).
In his foreword to the English edition of "The Defense," VN wrote: "Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' — which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely — but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius."
Nabokov's fondness for Luzhin is quite unlike Charles Kinbote's for John Shade: "His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation." I could never warm towards this successful fictional poet, haunted by Kinbote and his inept efforts to impinge Zembla and Gradus upon him.
However, a "good reader" isn't expected to despise or love the characters in a novel, is he (she)? And I suppose it's all right if one loves its ghostly author in his plight against the world. As Nabokov teaches in "Speak, Memory" (290-91), when he associates art and chess: "It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world)."*
....................................................................................................................................................
* - Steve Norquist and Stan Kelly-Bootle, by sheer chance, while trying to find the S,M quote on line, I found another "VN chess problems" site:
The Nabokovian Problem - by Robert Tuohey - Past Pawns - chess ...
www.chessville.com/.../NabokovianProblem.htm -
(I managed to evade Jo Morgan's link on "Freudian Slips" in the nick of time!)
.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/