Carolyn Kunin: "The difference between playing the game and devising problems is something I hadn't thought about much ... The devising of puzzles must use a different set of muscles than the solving of them. And when one is playing the game it does not feel as if one is solving a puzzle - or you would know the outcome. [  ]  the puzzle removes all "freedom" from the player [  ] On the other hand, in VN's fictional games, Pale Fire preeminently, whether the player or reader solves the puzzle/s or not, even if he makes no attempt to, he can still enjoy the game. "

 

Jansy Mello: You have the knack of setting me off along a trail of variegated conjectures, Carolyn! I'm no chess player, though and, sadly, no chess solver either - but I can still enjoy the games. I was impressed by your points (the chess player doesn't feel he is solving a puzzle because he doesn't know the outcome, consequently, the puzzle removes all freedom from the player*).

 

Strangely enough, for me, in this sense of "predicting a future," Nabokov's novels aren't chess-problems at all (neither concerning their intended plot, neither in relation to the effects they have over different readers at different times). They may have chess-problem incrustations or, as in "The Defense," function predominantly in a way that is "analogous" to a particular chess game. 

VN mentions at various points in his interviews and novels that "there's not a (deterministically established) future" (it is brought up more clearly in "Transparent Things") and he might have plotted his novels accordingly (not the short-stories, perhaps, if I got Eric Hyman's point:)..

 

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* -There's a paragraph in ADA that illustrates this point and, surprisingly, brings up another one, related to Pale Fire's "doubles" - as if both books were engaged in our present discussion ...

"There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development".

:  .