Stan Kelly-Bootle: CK’s reported ‘King & Queen asymmetry’ will
come as a surprise to ALL chess players, both the skilled
amateur (like Nabokov/Sirin, author of "Защита Лужина," the
‘worst chess novel ever written!’), and first-day learners!
See http://chess.about.com/od/rulesofchess/ss/Boardsetup.htm You’ll see that the White Queen, initially at d1,
‘faces/looks-at’ the Red (aka Black) Queen, initially on d8,
separated by pawns at d2 and d7. Likewise the two Kings
initially ‘face/look-at’ each other along the e-column, from
e1 and e8, with pawns at e2 and e7. Both the board and
piece-settings are positively dripping with symmetries.
These make the game the fairest of all, and ‘boredom’
doesn’t enter into it!
Jansy Mello: Whose
words are you quoting, Stan, when you see "Защита Лужина," as
the ‘worst chess novel ever written!’? VN was quite young when
he wrote it but he was, already, definitely Nabokov (albeit
somewhat too blatantly contrived). Besides, as it seems to be
obvious from my acceptance of CK's perspective, I'm no
chess-player. Many of the strategies found in the text didn't
exact this kind of talent from me to enjoy the plot (although
I'm still in the dark about how to relate Luzhin's suicide in
the novel, and the "self-mate" move in chess)
How do you
and fellow chess-talents interpret this paragraph from ADA?
(the most intriguing parts are the author's insistence on
"one" board and "two brains," plus the relation between
intermediary infinite number of variations and the conclusive
destiny of a "converging development."
"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."
PS: Alexey, I was awed by your informations
concerning VN, Byron and Pushkin. I cannot recall any great
ingerence of Byron's works in the VN's discussions about
Pushkin with Edmund Wilson (perhaps only a quarrel about what
kind of translation of Byron - and why in translation - did
Pushkin read. However, from your notes and Abdel's interested
expertise, I agree that the influence of Byron on VN's ADA
is huge and not suficciently discussed (or is it?).