The Luzhin Defense

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Do you play chess? I do, and I used to play it every day during recess in secondary school with a friend who was as keen on it as I was. As I knew from that young age, chess is a sport. It requires intense focus, discipline, and the will to beat your opponent. It is also an art, as I also knew, because it demands creativity, subtlety, and a love of beauty. The sacrifice of a rook to launch a mating sequence. The stark precision of an endgame with just the kings and four pawns.

When I stood before the early Russian novels by Vladimir Nabokov in Eslite Bookstore in Kuala Lumpur, where I paid a short visit in August, it was an easy decision to pick up The Luzhin Defense. I knew the Russian writer loved chess almost as much as butterflies. I wanted to know how he would deal with the game in a work of fiction. From his third novel written in Russian, translated by Michael Scammell, I learned that chess is also a refuge from reality.

The pattern is set in the indulgent childhood of the protagonist. Loving his cosseted life in the country home too much and afraid of the challenges of starting school in town, Luzhin, Junior, escaped from the coach taking him to the train station and ran back to hide in the attic of his house. He was found and forced to start his career in the world, but he discovered chess, first from his aunt who is having an affair with his father, and then from an older suitor to his aunt who always brings her flowers. Chess becomes Luzhin's homely shelter as he ascends the ladder of the chess world rapidly and ignores the requirements of society, love, and even basic hygiene.

Just like chess, sports and the arts can become our refuge from reality too. When we ware caught up with the Olympics spectacle, we could stop watching the massacres in Gaza and Sudan. The inclusion of Myanmar in the Games normalized junta rule in that country. Sporting rivalry could potentially defuse political and military conflict—fight on the soccer field, not on the battlefield—but it doesn't.

Poetry, which is the form of art I know best, could be deployed to socio-political ends, and it is. Our press Gaudy Boy has published some of the best political poetry in Jeddie Sophronius' Interrogation Records, Jhani Randhawa's Time Regime, and Jim Pascual Agustin's Waking Up to the Pattern Left By a Snail Overnight. But as a practitioner of the dark art myself, I know intimately that writing about the thing is not the thing itself. When writing, I'm paying attention to, and enjoying, the sound and shape of words. I'm undisturbed at home, and not out on the streets, protesting. 

The best political poetry, I think, betrays this guilty consciousness. Like all poetry, it is double-minded. It is an existential lesson underlined by Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense. The novel never gives us the actual chess defensive strategy, and Luzhin finds it in the end only by—. You will have to read the book to find out.

*

We announced the finalists of the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize last Tuesday. You can find out who they are here. The finalists will read from their work in an online reading in September, when the winner will be announced. Sign up for details of what promises to be an exciting reading. 

Jee Leong Koh
August 22, 2024

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