Books: Faded Snapshot

THE DEFENSE by Vladimir Nabokov. 256 pages. Putnam. $5.

That prominent lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov is a busy but exceedingly thrifty man. During the past decade, in between chasing butterflies, translating Pushkin (TIME, July 31), and writing his brilliant, cross-grained fiction, he has been bringing to market carefully supervised English translations of his own early novels, which he wrote in Russian in the days when he was a member of the Czarist émigré community in Berlin and Paris. Several of these translations, notably 1963’s version of The Gift (his last Russian novel), have displayed the unmistakable Nabokov wit and sardonic inventiveness. The Defense is the earliest of his work yet to be reissued, and reading Nabokov of the ’20s is like looking at a childhood snapshot of an old friend: the features are uncomfortably unformed, the resemblances often disappointing.

The Defense is Nabokov’s version of one of the most dependable items (almost as obligatory as the one about a tuberculosis sanitarium) in the repertory of the young European romantic after World War I. It is the story of a genius chess player who is at last driven insane by his obsession with the game. Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin is an unappealing, neurasthenic child who finds refuge from an incomprehensible world in the ordered clarity of the chessboard. The child prodigy grows to be a grand master and to play for the world championship—only to crack up from fatigue and immaturity at the crucial move of his last match.

From that point, even a devoted wife cannot save Luzhin from eventual suicide, nor can Nabokov’s most artful verbal games save the reader from the realization that the gently maniacal Luzhin is a sentimental stereotype. This time out, Nabokov’s butterfly net has brought back only an old chess nut.