Read Online The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online Page A

casual, easy gestures with which his son moved this or that piece. The game had lasted but a few minutes when his son said: “If you do this it’s mate and if you do that you lose your Queen,” and he, confused, took his move back and began to think properly, inclining his head first to the left and then to the right, slowly stretching out his fingers toward the Queen and quickly snatching them away again, as if burned, while in the meantime his son calmly, and with uncharacteristic tidiness, put the taken pieces into their box. Finally Luzhin senior made his move whereupon there started a devastation of his positions, and then he laughed unnaturally and knocked his King over in sign of surrender. In this way he lost three games and realized that should he play ten more the result would be just the same, and yet he was unable to stop. At the very beginning of the fourth game Luzhin pushed back the piece moved by his father and with a shake of his head said in a confident unchildlike voice: “The worst reply. Chigorin suggests taking the Pawn.” And when with incomprehensible, hopeless speed he had lost this game as well, Luzhin senior again laughed, and with tremblinghand began to pour milk into a cut-glass tumbler, on the bottom of which lay a raspberry core, which now floated to the surface and circled, unwilling to be extracted. His son put away the board and the box on a wicker table in the corner and having blurted a phlegmatic “good night” softly closed the door behind him.
    “Oh well, I should have expected something like this,” said Luzhin senior, wiping the tips of his fingers with a handkerchief. “He’s not just amusing himself with chess, he’s performing a sacred rite.”
    A fat-bodied, fluffy moth with glowing eyes fell on the table after colliding with the lamp. A breeze stirred lightly through the garden. The clock in the drawing room started to chime daintily and struck twelve.
    “Nonsense,” he said, “stupid imagination. Many youngsters are excellent chess players. Nothing surprising in that. The whole affair is getting on my nerves, that’s all. Bad of her—she shouldn’t have encouraged him. Well, no matter.…”
    He thought drearily that in a moment he would have to lie, to remonstrate, to soothe, and it was midnight already.…
    “I want to sleep,” he said, but remained sitting in the armchair.
    And early next morning in the darkest and mossiest corner of the dense coppice behind the garden little Luzhin buried his father’s precious box of chessmen, assuming this to be the simplest way of avoiding any kind of complications, for now there were other chessmen that he could use openly. His father, unable to suppress his interest in the matter, went off to see the gloomy country doctor, whowas a far better chess player than he, and in the evening after dinner, laughing and rubbing his hands, doing his best to ignore the fact that all this was wrong—but why wrong he could not say—he sat his son down with the doctor at the wicker table on the veranda, himself set out the pieces (apologizing for the purple thingum), sat down beside the players and began avidly following the game. Twitching his bushy eyebrows and tormenting his fleshy nose with a large hairy fist, the doctor thought long over every move and from time to time would lean back in his chair as if able to see better from a distance, and make big eyes, and then lurch heavily forward, his hands braced against his knees. He lost—and grunted so loudly that his wicker armchair creaked in response. “But look, look!” exclaimed Luzhin senior. “You should go this way and everything is saved—you even have the better position.” “Don’t you see I’m in check?” growled the doctor in a bass voice and began to set out the pieces anew. And when Luzhin senior went out into the dark garden to accompany the doctor as far as the footpath with its border of glowworms leading down to the bridge, he heard the words he had so