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Re: [NABOKOV-L] Suimate and Petrov
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Re[2]: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Suimate and PetrovSergey Sakoun: I'm not a "chess-expert" and not a "mathematician"...But I have a real solution of the chess problem (and composition of the novel as a whole). As I suppose it's a first real solution of the Nabokov's novel- riddle. Key-article on the novel "Luzhin Defense" was published in 1999. Key words - allegory Luzhin as a Black chess Knight. And plot of the chess problem (Luzhin Defence) and novel as whole based on a sacrifice of the Black Knight. ((Luzhin in the novel as a rule plays Black) And Luzhin Defence is a Gambit... The problem of «suicide, or rather suimate» as a chess-psychology allegorical phenomenon considering in psychology article "Chess-psychological problems of the novel «The Defense»".Extraction from it is here."Insane Luzhin of the last chapter is personification of the sacrificial Black Knight.He's afraid death, he's seek salvation, escape from author of "Luzhin Defense" (and as a chess problem (author himself), and as a novel (author VN)). His solution's method, his quest based on repetition of the chess move. Hi's need in that moves, he's provoking every next move, but every next move make him nearer to sacrificial death. Consequently he's quest salvation (from threat that exists only in his mad mind) turn out "suimate" actions, final result of which become «suicide". And final scene is a exactly fulfillment "Luzhin Defense", a sacrifice of the Black Knight." That is essence of problem, full evidence and investigation of which occupied about two hundred pages. There is really marvelous pattern of novel composition. It is really opening new horizon of senses.
JM: Just now did I receive Sergey Sakoun's reply about patterns in "The Luzhin Defense" demanding the "sacrifice of the Black Knight," with a very rich bibliography which, until now, shall remain inaccessible to me. Before S.Sakoun's message reached me, I was writing down my comments to Dave Haan's contribution (off-list) and this is why I shall reproduce them here, without considering S.Sakoun's generous arguments (with whatever means I must still find out later on, since I cannot read or speak Russian.) S.Sakoun's line of thought seems to demolish my views, still headstrongly centered on the idea that Luzhin has to check-mate the white king and decides to drop out of the game before accomplishing this command.
Here is my original posting:
Dave Haan sent me (off-list*) the imprescindible clarification about selfmate: "force checkmate not on the side without control, but on the side with control". Also important is his distinction about the actual match between Luzhin and Turati, seen as "only a part of the matrix in which the metaphor is embedded" in connection to the option of interpreting "The Luzhin Defense as a selfmate."
In his foreword to the English edition (in 1964, therefore suspiciously close to Pale Fire and to Shade's lines about imitating the gods who "promote ebony fauns in a game of worlds" in order to share in their pleasure) Nabokov writes about his "attractive novel--the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero.", thereby excluding this metaphysical dimension, which I continue to take for granted - inspite of the emphasis on the novel as being only concerned with chess problems.
Like John Updike**, Dave Haan considers that "the Turati that Luzhin prepares for is not the actual opponent but one Luzhin constucts in his own mind," and this fantasy is well described by Khodasevich in connection to both Turati and Valentinov ( Luzhin's Defense, translated from the Russian by Jeff Edmunds, on Zembla). However, in relation to what Nabokov defined as his chess "metaphor," for me there is another, one that is an all-embracing world-game being played with human pawns. As I see it, it is here that Valentinov plays a crucial role - by trapping Luzhin into playing one more game, one which shall give continuity to the interrupted match with Turati and in which he expected to lose. (Valentinov treacherously places his bet on Turati)*** I'll develop this in the end of the next paragraph.
In his introduction to the 1995 renewed edition of Recreational Mathematics (Mathematical Association of America, Washington DC, p. 9), Martin Gardner writes: "Vladimir Nabokov's great chess novel, The Defense, is about such a man [using chess as a kind of drug]. He permited chess (one form of mathematicalplay)to dominate his mind so completely that he finally lost contact with the real world and ended his miserable life-game with what chess problemists call a suimate or self-mate. He jumped out of a window. It is consistent with the steady disintegration of Nabokov's chess master that, as a boy, he had been a poor student, even in mathematics, at the same time that he had been "extraordinarily engrossed in a collection of problems entitled Merry Mathematics, in the fantastical misbehavior of numbers and the wayward frolic of geometric lines, in everything that the shoolbook lacked." For Gardner, Luzhin's suicide ends his " miserable life-game with what chess problemists call a suimate or self-mate." But as Valentinov, in my eyes, represents the author, it's the author who needs him to play the role of the Gods in his stead, thereby representing the forces of destiny that rule over everyone's life (John Shade's insight). In his madness, trapped Luzhin sees Valentinov as the enemy, the evil agent who has preordained all his future moves (contrary to Krug's final discovery in Bend Sinister?). Valentinov becomes the opponent Luzhin has constructed in his mind and his only escape is through suicide, considered as a way to drop out of the game (the author's). As a character, whose entire life has been pre-programmed to turn him into a chessmaster and, besides, to play the role of an author's chess-piece, Luzhin comes to realize that he's been playing a looser's game. He cannot lead his moves towards the pre-determined "suimate" by killing Valentino/Nabokov. His suicide, on the contrary, is the opposite move to a "suimate" (his moves are controlled to kill the controller himself in the case of a "suimate").
................................................................................................
* - Dave Haan: "Chess and chess problems are different disciplines (due to different objectives) sharing an underlying matrix. The uniqueness of solution to chess problems and satisfaction of imposed conditions (how many moves to checkmate) are key constraints. Unorthodox, or fairy, chess problems vary the matrix or conditions (objectives) that further remove them from chess proper; selfmate is the reversal of objective (force checkmate not on the side without control, but on the side with control: no matter what Black's response, White's moves compel Black to give checkmate in the prescribed number of moves).
The grounds for describing The Luzhin Defense as a selfmate are not based on the chess matches that Luzhin undertakes; these are merely part of the matrix in which the metaphor is embedded. Luzhin does not set out to lose in chess but in life, so determined to exercise control in the latter (using the former as model) that he's willing to change his objectives to suit.
from Karshan, VN & the Art of Play: "... the chess analogies in The Luzhin Defense tempt the reader with parallels and patterns that can never quite be defined, producing what Luzhin sees in his childhood delirium, 'the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board' (71). As Leona Toker has argued, 'its chess patterns stand for all the patterns and systems that prove tragically inadequate when preferred to or violently superimposed on the natural flow of life.'" (Karshan also compares with Pushkin's Queen of Spades, and with Apollo Apollonovich in Bely's Petersburg.)
As far as the chess goes, the Turati that Luzhin prepares for is not the actual opponent but one Luzhin constructs in his own mind. Luzhin does not set out to lose in chess."
** "Grandmaster Nabokov" by John Updike, September 26, 1964 The New Republic (http://www.tnr.imr.com/article/books-and-arts/grandmaster-nabokov)
"We know, from Chapter XIV of his autobiography, that Nabokov's forte was not tournament play but the "beautiful, complex and sterile art" of composing chess problems of a "poetico mathematical type". On this level as a work-epic of chess...The Defense is splendly shaped toward Luzhin's match with Turati...and during the tournament in which Luzhin thinks himself into a nervous breakdown suspense mounts...a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic" and, further on, "I'm not sure it perfectly works, this chess puzzle pieced out with human characters...The reintroduction of Valentinov, though well-prepared, does not function smoothly...I am unable to feel Luzhin's descent into an eternity of "dark and pale squares" as anything but the foreordained outcome of a scheme that, however pretty, is less weight than the human fictions [Anna Karenina's and Eva Bovary's suicide, or Kirillov's] it has conjured up."
*** - Updike's conclusions about Nabokov's pretty scheme concerning Luzhin's suicide is echoed, very recently, by movie critic Alan A. Stone: "Valentinov, a minor figure in the novel, becomes the evil serpent, the plot device of the film [Marleen Gorris's "The Defense," and her construction of Luzhin's "traumatic childhood"]...Gorris's Luzhin cracks under Valentinov's manipulations" ( "No Defense: The Luzhin defence turns a clever novel into pop-psychological tripe," by Alan A. Stone.). For me, Luzhin was "cracked" since he was a little (almost autistic) boy and he resents the external world, his parents and school-mates from the very start.
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JM: Just now did I receive Sergey Sakoun's reply about patterns in "The Luzhin Defense" demanding the "sacrifice of the Black Knight," with a very rich bibliography which, until now, shall remain inaccessible to me. Before S.Sakoun's message reached me, I was writing down my comments to Dave Haan's contribution (off-list) and this is why I shall reproduce them here, without considering S.Sakoun's generous arguments (with whatever means I must still find out later on, since I cannot read or speak Russian.) S.Sakoun's line of thought seems to demolish my views, still headstrongly centered on the idea that Luzhin has to check-mate the white king and decides to drop out of the game before accomplishing this command.
Here is my original posting:
Dave Haan sent me (off-list*) the imprescindible clarification about selfmate: "force checkmate not on the side without control, but on the side with control". Also important is his distinction about the actual match between Luzhin and Turati, seen as "only a part of the matrix in which the metaphor is embedded" in connection to the option of interpreting "The Luzhin Defense as a selfmate."
In his foreword to the English edition (in 1964, therefore suspiciously close to Pale Fire and to Shade's lines about imitating the gods who "promote ebony fauns in a game of worlds" in order to share in their pleasure) Nabokov writes about his "attractive novel--the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero.", thereby excluding this metaphysical dimension, which I continue to take for granted - inspite of the emphasis on the novel as being only concerned with chess problems.
Like John Updike**, Dave Haan considers that "the Turati that Luzhin prepares for is not the actual opponent but one Luzhin constucts in his own mind," and this fantasy is well described by Khodasevich in connection to both Turati and Valentinov ( Luzhin's Defense, translated from the Russian by Jeff Edmunds, on Zembla). However, in relation to what Nabokov defined as his chess "metaphor," for me there is another, one that is an all-embracing world-game being played with human pawns. As I see it, it is here that Valentinov plays a crucial role - by trapping Luzhin into playing one more game, one which shall give continuity to the interrupted match with Turati and in which he expected to lose. (Valentinov treacherously places his bet on Turati)*** I'll develop this in the end of the next paragraph.
In his introduction to the 1995 renewed edition of Recreational Mathematics (Mathematical Association of America, Washington DC, p. 9), Martin Gardner writes: "Vladimir Nabokov's great chess novel, The Defense, is about such a man [using chess as a kind of drug]. He permited chess (one form of mathematicalplay)to dominate his mind so completely that he finally lost contact with the real world and ended his miserable life-game with what chess problemists call a suimate or self-mate. He jumped out of a window. It is consistent with the steady disintegration of Nabokov's chess master that, as a boy, he had been a poor student, even in mathematics, at the same time that he had been "extraordinarily engrossed in a collection of problems entitled Merry Mathematics, in the fantastical misbehavior of numbers and the wayward frolic of geometric lines, in everything that the shoolbook lacked." For Gardner, Luzhin's suicide ends his " miserable life-game with what chess problemists call a suimate or self-mate." But as Valentinov, in my eyes, represents the author, it's the author who needs him to play the role of the Gods in his stead, thereby representing the forces of destiny that rule over everyone's life (John Shade's insight). In his madness, trapped Luzhin sees Valentinov as the enemy, the evil agent who has preordained all his future moves (contrary to Krug's final discovery in Bend Sinister?). Valentinov becomes the opponent Luzhin has constructed in his mind and his only escape is through suicide, considered as a way to drop out of the game (the author's). As a character, whose entire life has been pre-programmed to turn him into a chessmaster and, besides, to play the role of an author's chess-piece, Luzhin comes to realize that he's been playing a looser's game. He cannot lead his moves towards the pre-determined "suimate" by killing Valentino/Nabokov. His suicide, on the contrary, is the opposite move to a "suimate" (his moves are controlled to kill the controller himself in the case of a "suimate").
................................................................................................
* - Dave Haan: "Chess and chess problems are different disciplines (due to different objectives) sharing an underlying matrix. The uniqueness of solution to chess problems and satisfaction of imposed conditions (how many moves to checkmate) are key constraints. Unorthodox, or fairy, chess problems vary the matrix or conditions (objectives) that further remove them from chess proper; selfmate is the reversal of objective (force checkmate not on the side without control, but on the side with control: no matter what Black's response, White's moves compel Black to give checkmate in the prescribed number of moves).
The grounds for describing The Luzhin Defense as a selfmate are not based on the chess matches that Luzhin undertakes; these are merely part of the matrix in which the metaphor is embedded. Luzhin does not set out to lose in chess but in life, so determined to exercise control in the latter (using the former as model) that he's willing to change his objectives to suit.
from Karshan, VN & the Art of Play: "... the chess analogies in The Luzhin Defense tempt the reader with parallels and patterns that can never quite be defined, producing what Luzhin sees in his childhood delirium, 'the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board' (71). As Leona Toker has argued, 'its chess patterns stand for all the patterns and systems that prove tragically inadequate when preferred to or violently superimposed on the natural flow of life.'" (Karshan also compares with Pushkin's Queen of Spades, and with Apollo Apollonovich in Bely's Petersburg.)
As far as the chess goes, the Turati that Luzhin prepares for is not the actual opponent but one Luzhin constructs in his own mind. Luzhin does not set out to lose in chess."
** "Grandmaster Nabokov" by John Updike, September 26, 1964 The New Republic (http://www.tnr.imr.com/article/books-and-arts/grandmaster-nabokov)
"We know, from Chapter XIV of his autobiography, that Nabokov's forte was not tournament play but the "beautiful, complex and sterile art" of composing chess problems of a "poetico mathematical type". On this level as a work-epic of chess...The Defense is splendly shaped toward Luzhin's match with Turati...and during the tournament in which Luzhin thinks himself into a nervous breakdown suspense mounts...a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic" and, further on, "I'm not sure it perfectly works, this chess puzzle pieced out with human characters...The reintroduction of Valentinov, though well-prepared, does not function smoothly...I am unable to feel Luzhin's descent into an eternity of "dark and pale squares" as anything but the foreordained outcome of a scheme that, however pretty, is less weight than the human fictions [Anna Karenina's and Eva Bovary's suicide, or Kirillov's] it has conjured up."
*** - Updike's conclusions about Nabokov's pretty scheme concerning Luzhin's suicide is echoed, very recently, by movie critic Alan A. Stone: "Valentinov, a minor figure in the novel, becomes the evil serpent, the plot device of the film [Marleen Gorris's "The Defense," and her construction of Luzhin's "traumatic childhood"]...Gorris's Luzhin cracks under Valentinov's manipulations" ( "No Defense: The Luzhin defence turns a clever novel into pop-psychological tripe," by Alan A. Stone.). For me, Luzhin was "cracked" since he was a little (almost autistic) boy and he resents the external world, his parents and school-mates from the very start.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/