Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Because in The Defense Nabokov also rethinks the relationship between author and reader, he discloses here for the first time that he will be one of the great innovators of fiction. He would later declare that just as the real struggle in a chess problem was not between black and white but between the problem's designer and its hypothetical solver, so the great drama of a novel lay less in the conflict between its characters than in the tussle between its author and its reader.

In The Defense Nabokov has learned to put one part of a world together with another, selecting details, controlling angles, shifting foci, proliferating patterns, with a speed, economy, fluidity, and harmony fiction has rarely attained. By his masterly handling of the relationship of part and part he has refined the classical narrative virtues to new standards of perfection.

Unexpectedly Luzhin gazes back on those tiresome afternoons of the past with a sense of swooning delight: unexpected, but a sure psychological touch, for we treasure fondly even the aches of the past—because they no longer have the power to hurt, because they now constitute part of our own unique selves, because they cannot be retrieved

Nabokov knows that with the right guidance, the right detail, our minds can move with far more freedom than we think. He builds up Luzhin's world not through a ponderous accumulation of leaden fact but by a limpid mobility of imagination that makes each speck live and all space cohere.

Knowing that in everyday life none of us can cross the line between absence and presence, self and world, Nabokov exploits the special conditions of written language to smudge or sharpen the line at will and does it with such speed and grace that we feel nothing could be simpler than to step over to the other side and back—if only life could allow us the freedom we find here in language.

In reality there may be an inflexible barrier between the self inside and the world outside, but Nabokov also knew that language could almost breach it. More freely than any other writer before him, he glides back and forth from third-person to first-person narrative within the same story, swiftly or slowly, abruptly or so smoothly as to escape detection.

Nothing sustained Nabokov as a writer more than his memories of a radiantly secure childhood that let him grow up an exceptionally assured young man. In Mary he simply replayed part of his past; in King, Queen, Knave he avoided it. In The Defense he inverted it, as he would invert so much of his life to create his future heroes: his own security becomes Luzhin's fear, the parental love he thrived on becomes for Luzhin just another unbearable irritation.

Nabokov makes the problems of metaphysics urgent again. He shows how it may well be possible that this world might hide more that we just cannot see, simply because human consciousness wears such blinkers. If there can lurk within the circumscribed world of a novel so much that we cannot notice or do not even have reason to suspect on a first or second encounter, how much more might there be hidden in our own world, where one run through time is all we get.