Playing Chess with Buonaparte in Nabokov's 'Luzhin Defense'

• In Event: Metaphor, Representation, and Hidden Stories in the Russian Literary Tradition

Abstract

In Nabokov's prose, there are always hidden storylines. So, for example, in the Defense of Luzhin it is quite difficult to detect the constant presence of the theme of Napoleon. Napoleon's name itself appears in the text only once in chapter 10, when his fiancée looks "at his ponderous profile (the profile of a flabbier Napoleon)."
But Nabokov also plays with his family name Buonaparte, which he translated into Russian and used three times: in Chapter 9— “a distracted little man in the sanatorium repeated several times. times “An unfinished game! And such a good game!” (buona partita). And twice at the end of Chapter 11: “good match” (buona partita) as an expression meaning a successful marriage, echoes here with “chess match”— “such a good game” (buona partita, a scacchi).

What idea did Nabokov try to convey to readers when comparing life in Luzhin's game and life in Napoleon's war? For Napoleon, all people are "cannon fodder", expendable material, which leo Tolstoy perfectly showed in War and Peace. Luzhin also perceives the world around him as a kind of chess game in which he tries to find solutions. For both, this is due to some special property of the mind, the "game of the mind."

Author

• Rusina Volkova, Independent Scholar