Postby Z Kornin 

quote

"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.


On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Jansy <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
Carolyn Kunin: "... 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.[   ]  The memoir became the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story."[  ] "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'."
 
Jansy Mello: You reminded me of two things. In the first place, that Nabokov wasn't as keen on playing chess as he was in devising chess problems.So, his invitation in "Conclusive Evidence" turns the reader into a chess player and this promotes a distancing distinction bt. him and those readers whose joy depends on solving the problem and winning the game, instead of following the malicious turns and clever devices of his mind (another kind of "discovery game"). 
 
Still stuck with Kinbote's mention of Proust's "flora of metaphors," I started to read again Beckett's essay, which was not a true academic work, filled with footnotes, references and quotes, although his work already carried the mark of his future writings (a variation of VN's Memoir that isn't just a Memoir, i.e, an Essay that's not an academic feat). Beckett became close to James Joyce during his stay in Paris. Joyce, noticing the young man's talent, invited him to join a collective travail evolving around what he'd been writing in 1922, namely, his "Work in Progress, published much later, in 1939, as Finnegans Wake (Beckett was in charge of researching Bruno, Vico and Dante and his results were published as a part of "Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress") ..
 
Factifications, indeed! And these carry me to the second association to your comment. It's a quote, from Mark Twain's Autobiography (which I haven't read) After all, if Clement's observation is true, he must have inadvertently transformed his "very personal life story" into literary fiction then and there. ( "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.")



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Norky
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