Steve Norquist: From the diagram of VN's problem in my earlier post*, the solution for White supposedly begins with 1. Bc2, but I don't recall where I read that, and I am much more fond of playing chess than of solving chess problems.

 

Jansy Mello: Your earlier post (which I reproduced as a foot-note here) was very informative and carefully researched and was a good answer to several queries posted by Carolyn Kunin. Unlike most of you, I neither play chess nor solve chess problems and this is why there's nothing I can add here by way of a comment, except to thank you for.posting it.  

 

Robert Ropert's query about John Tanner mentioned Pushkin's "affection" for A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830). The name Tanner seemed to ring a bell for me and I tried to check why. Unfortunately, I drew a blank but I found out that, perhaps, Pushkin's interest in the book could be derived from his critical point of view.: "As an essayist Pushkin was prolific but most of his writings remained in draft form...Chiefly Pushkin concentrated on literature and history, but he did not develop a systematic philosophical view – it has been said that Pushkin lacked "central vision".... The responsibility of the Decembrist Rebellion Pushkin shifted onto foreign influences. He was fascinated by democratic republicanism but perceived the tendency to idealize the natural state of life, as exemplified both in the work of James Fenimore Cooper and in political discussion in the United States, as was shown in his essay "Dzhon Tenner" (1836, John Tanner)." [Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008] .

America as seen through European eyes must have interested Nabokov, at least there are suggestive paragraphs in "Lolita" (dealing with Chateaubriand, tigers and wide plains, if memory serves me right.) Some of these visions were espoused by authors who never actually visited America (I have Coleridge in mind, after one of JLBorges's lectures on English Literature... )

Concerning the "tendency to idealize the natural state of life" perhaps VN's views are kept hidden, despite his indirect reference to JJ Rousseau in Pale Fire, when John Shade affirms, in French, that “l’homme est né bon,”**

 

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* Nabokov engaged in an intriguing duel against Lewis Carroll - played out in the symbolic language of chess. Nabokov's key chess problem and its accompanying commentary were originally published in the article 'Exile' in the Partisan Review in early 1951, following its earlier rejection by the New Yorker magazine. A letter sent in March 1950 by Nabokov to his New Yorker editor and friend Katharine White confirms that the author thought
this chess problem was extremely important and was related, in some mysterious way, to the chess game plotted by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-glass. As Nabokov explained:"When coming to the last pages of the piece 'Exile,' please remember that the frontispiece to the first edition of 'Alice in the Looking Glass' carries a very subtle and difficult chess problem, and I would not like to think that New Yorker readers could be more bewildered by my chess problem (which occupies only a few lines) than Dodgson's little readers" (Selected Letters, 99).
Shortly after its publication in the Partisan Review, the chess problem in question was incorporated by Nabokov into Chapter Fourteen of his autobiography, Speak, Memory/Conclusive Evidence. It has since been reproduced in chess diagram format, in Poems and Problems (1972, p.182) where it is accompanied by Nabokov's succinct comment "composed in Paris, mid-May 1940…The irresistible try is for the bafflement of sophisticated solvers". V. Nabokov  "Speak Memory" 1951

#2

But the 'succinct comment' by the author (in the Gallimard 1999 reprint of "Poems and Problems") was: "Composé à Paris à la mi-mai 1940 (quelques jours avant d'émigrer aus États-Unis). Publié dans "Speak, Memory", 1951, et inclus par Lipton, Matthews, et Rice dans "Chess Problems", Londres, 1963. Un essai auquel il est difficile de résister et qui comblera d'aise les solutionnistes avertis."

 

** - PF: Charles Kinbote note to line 549: 

shade: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.

kinbote: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.

shade: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L’homme est né bon.

kinbote: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.