The Gambit: Chess and the Art of Competition in The Luzhin Defense

Abstract

This article argues that Vladimir Nabokov's 1929 novel The Luzhin Defense demonstrates the importance of literary competition, rivalry, and co‐creation to the Russian interwar emigration, 1920–40. I look at the function of the novel in Nabokov's career, placing it in relation to his contemporaneous articles and reviews, demonstrating how it can be understood as a strategic move effecting his transition, in publishing terms, from Berlin to Paris, and from relative obscurity to broad acclaim. Furthermore, The Luzhin Defense, though often considered to be a literary chess problem, in fact focuses on the notion of artistic careers in exile. I examine two such threads: the underappreciated artistic communion between the protagonist Luzhin and his great rival Turati; and the parodic portrayal of Luzhin's father, who fails at length to write the kind of novel within which Nabokov places him. I propose the concept of underwriting to explain the role of Luzhin's father, whose conspicuous failure (or underwriting) guarantees (or underwrites) Nabokov's own successful entry into the premier journal of the emigration, Contemporary Annals in Paris. In my interpretation of Luzhin and Turati's chess match, I introduce a little‐known 1929 text comparing chess problems and chess competition by the contemporary (1927–35) chess world champion Alexander Alekhine, a fellow‐Russian émigré. In so doing, I show how Nabokov's sympathetic yet wary portrayal of art as a sporting competition reflects his own broader strategy of co‐creative opposition to his fellow writers in exile.