Sergey Sakoun: "Could I argue for my point of view on the pattern of the novel...? My base thesis is that Nabokov’s novels are very transparent, but we must caress each little detail...And first step must be recombining details like in the puzzle game:...a certain weakness on the Queen's flank”...7 chapters = 7 moves. It is a center...“Horse” image...blinkers”...Knight move kisses" [...] To JM: "You are absolutely right, speaking on “relate it to Christ and his preordained destiny and death, or to his victorious resurrection”...But if in other VN’s texts that problem solving with a (+) mark, in “the Defense” on the contrary  it solved with a (-) mark. Like a tragedy parody of the Christian Sacrifice, fulfillment in the mad mind place of another said of the mirror, like a “qui pro quo”. Seek “salvation” – get a suicide. And “vice versa” – Sleptsov seek suicide but has found Salvation...A MATTER OF CHANCE”, “BACHMANN”, “THE CHRISTMAS STORY”, “MUSIC”, "The Aurelian") and   poems (“Chess Knigh”, “Stanzas on horse”} are the nearest texts (in time and in sense) to “The Defense” .

JM: S.K's examples are striking because they allowed me a glimpse into how certain words could appear to someone like Nabokov (who's mastered both English and Russian). I'm usually blind and deaf when I speak my native language, but when I use English I can always see and hear the words, as if they were "images." SK had me guessing about how they'd feel to him. Nabokov, for example, right at the novel's foreword, explains that "Grandmaster Luzhin: the name rhymes with 'illusion' if pronounced thickly enough to deepen the 'u' into 'oo'"* and this association, so obvious after his explanation, would have never occurred to me alone, because I lack the ability to associate "uzhin" to "oojon" by reading the printed letters. 

I agree with SK that there are definite patterns in "The Defense" and some of his examples were clarifying. I wonder, though, if Nabokov's Russian original, at the time when he still showed an adherence to Orthodox Christian (and mystical) beliefs, significantly differs from the English text - translated and with an explanatory foreword prepared thirty-three years later! -  to allow me to adopt SK's fascinating idea of a "quid pro quo," a mirror-like reversion ("seek 'salvation' get a suicide"). Lucette, in "Ada", is another sacrificial lamb linked to "krestik", "cross-words" and Christianity but, in this late novel, VN's iconoclastic allusions and irony are presented unambiguously.   


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* In Nabokov's foreword I found an item which I'd forgotten or missed, perhaps because I'd already found it hard to understand. The fact is that Nabokov himself describes Luzhin's suicide as a suimate: "I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers ...by drawing their attention to the first appearance of the frosted-window theme (associated with Luzhin's suicide, or rather suimate) as early as Chapter Eleven..."  He even clarifies it in its preceding paragraph and sets himself in the role of : "My story was difficult to compose, but I greatly enjoyed taking advantage of this or that image and scene to introduce a fatal pattern into Luzhin's life and to endow the description of a garden, a journey, a sequence of humdrum events, with the semblance of a game of skill, and, especially in the final chapters, with that of a regular chess attack demolishing the innermost elements of the poor fellow's sanity."  The interesting admission: "with the semblance of... a game, etc" is equally puzzling because I cannot avoid hearing John Shade's report about how he recovered "a faint hope."