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

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213
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chess was only an enchanting dream" (105).
Cured of a nervous breakdown
- the consequence of
this obsessional and exhausting preoccupation - Luzhin
is for a while obedient to the instruction to regard
chess as a "cold amusement", and he is "unable to
think of it without a feeling of revulsion" (126). He
gently submits to his wife's management of his life,
and in a vague, dreamy sort of way even enjoys it.
Then, by and by, chess takes hold of him again,
more fatally and frighteningly than before. He is
vaguely aware that a series of incidents seem to echo
certain decisive incidents from his past. He realizes
by degrees that this cannot be pure coincidence, but
fails at first to see through what he calls the combination.
Then, finally, comes a moment when things
do fall into place and when the combination reveals itself
to him, and this is for him a moment of aesthetic
and artistic enjoyment. He feels the same delight he
used to experience in connection with mathematics and
jigsaw puzzles, but above all with chess. Pride and
relief fill him, for he feels he has penetrated a
mystery. He has detected the combination and system
in the pattern of his life, found a pattern where there
did not seem to be one, and where none but himself will
see one. He experiences "that physiological sensation
of harmony which is so well known to artists" (168),
and which foreshadows the "combinational delight" that
Shade in Pale Fire experiences when he discovers
through his art the pattern and design underlying his
own
fate.