''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

-
212
-
his own future, and it becomes clear that this is
something which is beyond even the artist's range of
possibilities. Man cannot take part in "the game of
the gods"5 in which his fate is determined, and the
even more crucial fact, responsible for the failures
of those who are not aware of it, is that the future
does not exist; it is "but a figure of speech, a spec-
ter of thought. "6
All of this is fairly obvious in The Defence.
7
Luzhin, the hero of the novel (if one can call him a
hero) is isolated and uncommunicative as a child, and
interested only in those things in which, out of a
seeming chaos, some pattern and order is miraculously
seen to evolve: mathematics (12,28); jigsaw puzzles,
which, when the pieces are properly put together,
"formed at the last moment an intelligible picture"
(29); Sherlock Holmes stories, which take one "through
a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to one radiant
conclusion" (26).
He finds the qualities that fascinate him in all
these united in chess: their logic (26); the pattern
that, although hidden at first, gradually unfolds itself
and becomes transparent; and their harmony. By
and by he becomes absorbed in chess, to such a degree,
in fact, that he becomes unable to cope with life, and
for a while loses touch with it altogether. Whereas at
first he merely fails to see any longer the boundaries
between chess and life, chess gradually becomes an ob-
session with him and eventually assumes in his mind
the role of life, whereas "everything apart from