Some of the chess problems are in VN’s Poems and
Puzzles. I don’t know offhand whether the specific problem
referred to in Conclusive Evidence [Speak, Memory] is one of the ones in
Poems and Puzzles. In 1986 I gave a paper, “The Affinity between Nabokov’s Short
Stories and Chess Problems,” at the Vladimir
Nabokov Society Meeting, Modern Language Association Convention, New York
(abstract published in The Nabokovian, 18 [1987]). Therein I
argued that novels (or memoirs) and chess problems are very different: chess
games, novels and memoirs are developing, sequential narratives, whereas short
stories and chess problems depend on single key moves that determine everything
else, that the author sets for the reader/solver to figure out.
Pale
Fire thus would be sort of a hybrid:
it has two more or less sequential narratives, Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s
Zemblan fantasy; and is also akin to a chess problem, where the key move is
that reader needs to figure out that Kinbote is mad (and/or might be Botkin).
Eric Hyman
Professor of
English
Department of
English
Butler 133
Fayetteville
State University
1200 Murchison
Road
Fayetteville,
NC 28301-4252
(910) 672-1901
I was working on a chess
problem in the New York Times on Saturday and I did as well as the two winners
(both playing black). Which surprized me. But in any event, it got me to
thinking about Nabokov as a chess player.
Google led me to an interview
done with the author before fame struck, but in 1951, the latest book was ...
a
volume called "Conclusive Evidence." It was an autobiography and yet
it wasn't altogether so. Would Mr. Nabokov talk a bit about it? He would.
"It is a memoir," he said,
"and true. There is a good deal of selection in it, of course. What
interested me is the thematic lines of my life that resembles fiction. The
memoir became the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal
life story."
Was there any precedent for the memoir that
is to some extent manipulated or constructed or conceived as a novel? Mr.
Nabokov didn't think too long. "There isn't any precedent that I know
of," he said. "It is a literary approach to my own past. There is
some precedent for it in the novel, in Proust, say, but not in the memoir. With
me," Mr. Nabokov said, "it is a kind of composition. I am a composer
of chess problems. Nobody," he said, "has yet solved the chess
problem in 'Conclusive Evidence.'" What about a professional, a Reuben
Fine, a Reshevsky, or someone like that? "I'm waiting for one to come
along," Mr. Nabokov said in a voice that could have been as ambivalent as
Joyce's when people were starting to guess at the title of what turned out to
be "Finnegans Wake."
Now, as the
reader may imagine, the question perhaps not so much begged as raised by all
this is does anyone know about the chess problems referred to? are they
repeated in Speak, Memory? has anyone solved them?
Carolyn
February 18,
1951 Talk with Mr. Nabokov by Harvey Breit
All private editorial communications are read by both
co-editors.