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Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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thirsted to hear once, but now these words weighed heavy upon him—he would rather not have heard them at all.
The doctor started coming every night and since he was really a first-rate player he derived enormous pleasure from these incessant defeats. He brought Luzhin a chess handbook, advising him, however, not to get too carried away by it, not to tire himself, and to read in the open air. He spoke about the grand masters he had had the occasion to see, about a recent tournament, and also about the past of chess, about a somewhat doubtful rajah and about thegreat Philidor, who was also an accomplished musician. At times, grinning gloomily, he would bring what he termed “a sugarplum”—an ingenious problem cut out of some periodical. Luzhin would pore over it a while, find finally the solution and with an extraordinary expression on his face and radiant bliss in his eyes would exclaim, burring his r’s: “How glorious, how glorious!” But the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him whenever the doctor, with strokes of his hairy finger, removed his King farther and farther, and finally, nodded his head and sat there quite still, looking at the board, while Luzhin senior, who was always present, always craving a miracle—his son’s defeat—and was both frightened and overjoyed when his son won (and suffered from this complicated mixture of feelings), would seize a Knight or a Rook, crying that everything was not lost and would himself sometimes play to the end a hopelessly compromised game.
And thus it began. Between this sequence of evenings on the veranda and the day when Luzhin’s photograph appeared in a St. Petersburg magazine it was as if nothing had been, neither the country autumn drizzling on the asters, nor the journey back to town, nor the return to school. The photograph appeared on an October day soon after his first, unforgettable performance in a chess club. And everything else that took place between the return to town and the photograph—two months after all—was so blurry and so mixed up that later, in recalling this time, Luzhin was unable to say exactly when, for instance, that social evening had taken place at school—where in a corner,almost unnoticed by his schoolfellows, he had quietly beaten the geography teacher, a well-known amateur—or when on his father’s invitation a gray-haired Jew came to dinner, a senile chess genius who had been victorious in all the cities of the world but now lived in idleness and poverty, purblind, with a sick heart, having lost forever his fire, his grip, his luck.… But one thing Luzhin remembered quite clearly—the fear he experienced in school, the fear they would learn of his gift and ridicule him—and consequently, guided by this infallible recollection, he judged that after the game played at the social evening he must not have gone to school any more, for remembering all the shudders of his childhood he was unable to imagine the horrible sensation he would have experienced upon entering the classroom on the following morning and meeting those inquisitive, all-knowing eyes. He remembered, on the other hand, that after his picture appeared he refused to go to school and it was impossible to untangle in his memory the knot in which the social evening and the photograph were joined, it was impossible to say which came first and which second. It was his father who brought him the magazine, and the photograph was one taken the previous year, in the country: a tree in the garden and he next to it, a pattern of foliage on his forehead, a sullen expression on his slightly inclined face, and those narrow white shorts that always used to come unbuttoned in front. Instead of the joy expected by his father, he expressed nothing—but he did feel a secret joy: now this would put an end to school. They pleaded with him during the
The doctor started coming every night and since he was really a first-rate player he derived enormous pleasure from these incessant defeats. He brought Luzhin a chess handbook, advising him, however, not to get too carried away by it, not to tire himself, and to read in the open air. He spoke about the grand masters he had had the occasion to see, about a recent tournament, and also about the past of chess, about a somewhat doubtful rajah and about thegreat Philidor, who was also an accomplished musician. At times, grinning gloomily, he would bring what he termed “a sugarplum”—an ingenious problem cut out of some periodical. Luzhin would pore over it a while, find finally the solution and with an extraordinary expression on his face and radiant bliss in his eyes would exclaim, burring his r’s: “How glorious, how glorious!” But the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him whenever the doctor, with strokes of his hairy finger, removed his King farther and farther, and finally, nodded his head and sat there quite still, looking at the board, while Luzhin senior, who was always present, always craving a miracle—his son’s defeat—and was both frightened and overjoyed when his son won (and suffered from this complicated mixture of feelings), would seize a Knight or a Rook, crying that everything was not lost and would himself sometimes play to the end a hopelessly compromised game.
And thus it began. Between this sequence of evenings on the veranda and the day when Luzhin’s photograph appeared in a St. Petersburg magazine it was as if nothing had been, neither the country autumn drizzling on the asters, nor the journey back to town, nor the return to school. The photograph appeared on an October day soon after his first, unforgettable performance in a chess club. And everything else that took place between the return to town and the photograph—two months after all—was so blurry and so mixed up that later, in recalling this time, Luzhin was unable to say exactly when, for instance, that social evening had taken place at school—where in a corner,almost unnoticed by his schoolfellows, he had quietly beaten the geography teacher, a well-known amateur—or when on his father’s invitation a gray-haired Jew came to dinner, a senile chess genius who had been victorious in all the cities of the world but now lived in idleness and poverty, purblind, with a sick heart, having lost forever his fire, his grip, his luck.… But one thing Luzhin remembered quite clearly—the fear he experienced in school, the fear they would learn of his gift and ridicule him—and consequently, guided by this infallible recollection, he judged that after the game played at the social evening he must not have gone to school any more, for remembering all the shudders of his childhood he was unable to imagine the horrible sensation he would have experienced upon entering the classroom on the following morning and meeting those inquisitive, all-knowing eyes. He remembered, on the other hand, that after his picture appeared he refused to go to school and it was impossible to untangle in his memory the knot in which the social evening and the photograph were joined, it was impossible to say which came first and which second. It was his father who brought him the magazine, and the photograph was one taken the previous year, in the country: a tree in the garden and he next to it, a pattern of foliage on his forehead, a sullen expression on his slightly inclined face, and those narrow white shorts that always used to come unbuttoned in front. Instead of the joy expected by his father, he expressed nothing—but he did feel a secret joy: now this would put an end to school. They pleaded with him during the
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