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)."*
....................................................................................................................................................
* - 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:
www.chessville.com/.../NabokovianProblem.htm -
(I managed to evade Jo Morgan's link on "Freudian Slips" in
the nick of
time!)
.