continuation of "...an amusing kinbotean link (like Appel's
play at the end of his own -"I trust you have enjoyed this note, to
paraphrase a comment made by Kinbote under very different
circumstances" Vintage SO,165) states: "I stand by my original
definitions of defenestricide and autodefenestricide.."]
JM: The corresponding movie and stills related
to Harvey Loyd's "Safety Last" (connected to "The Defense" by Alfred
Appel Jr.,SO) didn't seem to fit the despondent image which lay on a
table, close to Luzhin, as described in VN's novel. I couldn't find an
anguished Harvey hanging from a ledge, nor was he at any time
suicidal. The movie itself is "a 1923 romantic comedy silent film...It
includes one of the most famous images from the silent film era: Lloyd
clutching the bending hands of a clock on the side of a building as he
dangles from the outside of a skyscraper above moving traffic." The
novel, by "Vladimir Nabokov, Защита Лужина (Zashchita Luzhina), was
published in 1930 and, by G. P. Putnam's Sons, in 1964, in a
translation by the author and Michael Scammell to the English as "The
Defense". The character of Luzhin is based on
Curt von Bardeleben, a chess master Nabokov knew personally. Bardeleben
ended his life by jumping out of a window...The book was also
influenced by the Soviet film "Chess Fever" (1925)."*
(This last information is confirmed by the
eminent Zemblan scholar Charles Kinbote **).
When we consider the entire setting of Loyd's movie Alfred
Appel's link must be correct. However, I'm as puzzled as ever by
Sirin's description of the prophetically tragic movie still...
Any ideas?
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
excerpts from CK's article:
"... Zashchita
Luzhina [literally, Luzhin's Defense] was written in 1929 ...and
published serially, first in Rul' (one chapter), then in Sovremennye
zapiski, nos. 40-42, and finally in book form later that same year by
Slovo in Berlin. An English version, translated by the author in
collaboration with Michael Scammell, was published in 1964 by Putnam as
The Defenestration. ...Laboriously tracking this or that minor
character or theme can be a bracing game or a good academic exercise
for students who lack the critical skills to appreciate literature's
true depth, but, ultimately, real scholars are called upon to evaluate
and then communicate as lucidly as possible the elusive links between
life and art. Where did the young Sirin, a passable player and sometime
composer of chess probems, find inspiration for his work? Commentators
have claimed a whole list of chess masters as models for Luzhin, from
the brilliant Pole Akiba Rubinstein (1882-1961) to the gifted if
erratic Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alekhin (1892-1946, who challenged
Cuban Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca for his title in 1927, just two
years prior to the composition of Zashchita Luzhina), to Zemblan
prodigy and grandmaster Lukacs Freivalds (b. 1905), to the eventually
paranoid American Paul Morphy (d. 1884), to the German champion
Bardeleben who committed suicide in 1924 by leaping from a window just
like our poor Alexandr Ivanovich...Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin,
although subsequently a puppet of his Bolshevik handlers, was a skilled
director whose work was well-known to the Berlin rabble, responsible
for a number of highly successful films, including a whimsical
short feature directed by Pudovkin entitled Shakhmatnaia goriachka
(Chess Fever), sequences of which were filmed, according to film
historian Kersten Schumacher, in a renovated barn outside
Charlottenberg, a suburb of Berlin. Chess Fever is the tale--intended
to be amusing but which I found to be only marginally so--of a young
suitor so obsessed by chess that he all but forgets about his
fiancee...The hero plays chess constantly, on checked tablecloths, on
the floor at his lover's feet on a checked handkerchief...His mania is
shared by a number of the city's inhabitants, including a policeman...a
plasterer of handbills, and two pharmacists, all of whom are shown
engrossed in chess when they should be policing, or plastering, or
pharming. The 'production designer'...of the film took great fun in
embedding the decor with chessboard motifs, which are ubiquitous...
Not only was Shakhmatnaia goriachka the point de depart for Zashchita
Luzhina, but the novel's late subplot--the prodigal Valentinov's
intention to cast Luzhin in a chess film--is derived directly from the
cameo in the film of Capablanca...In English, Chess Fever (1926), a
film by Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin (1893-1953)...All English
citations from The Defenestration (New York: Putnam, c1964, reprinted
1980)."
a few other excerpts, now from
"Luzhin's Defense," by Vladislav Khodasevich,translated from the
Russian by Jeff Edmunds: "Luzhin is moved by an automatism that is an
inadequate substitute for genuine realization...The artist is doomed to
sojourn in two worlds: in the real world and in the world of art he
himself has created. The true master is always to be found at that line
belonging to both worlds, where their planes intersect. Alienation from
reality, absolute immersion in the world of art, where there is no
flight, but only endless falling, is madness...Genius is measure,
harmony, perpetual balance. Luzhin is no genius. But neither is he
ungifted...Madness is his rightful destiny..Luzhin deserved the honor
of being called a victim of art. In madness, in the unceasing fall
through the abyss of chess, he probably would have found a peculiar
happiness..."