Frances Assa:" Lhuzin
never really grows up, does he? The three points in his life
show him as having the same childishness."
JM: John Updike, in
his criticism of VN's novel writes, in "Grandmaster
Nabokov" (TNR,1964): "The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of
genius from the tangle of a lonely boy's existence...By abruptly switching to
Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naive brightness so
that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of
heart..."
Nabokov described (among
other traits in Luzhin) many of the behavioral stereotypies found
in the "Asperger's Syndrome," long before these were clinically recognized
or associated to autism. Poor Sasha, not even the rich and loving Mrs.
Luzhin could help him. As for the
Easter patterns, possibly related to "rebirth" in another level of Luzhin's life-cycle, we
find chess, "the game of the gods," mingled with religious symbolism and,
quite mysteriously, marriage. Like the wooden golden egg won in a
tombola in Berlin, would marriage be related to some kind of
spiritual degradation?.