Word: luzhin
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Dates: during 1964-1964
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...most dependable items (almost as obligatory as the one about a tuberculosis sanitarium) in the repertory of the young European romantic after World War I. It is the story of a genius chess player who is at last driven insane by his obsession with the game. Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin is an unappealing, neurasthenic child who finds refuge from an incomprehensible world in the ordered clarity of the chessboard. The child prodigy grows to be a grand master and to play for the world championship-only to crack up from fatigue and immaturity at the crucial move of his last match...
From that point, even a devoted wife cannot save Luzhin from eventual suicide, nor can Nabokov's most artful verbal games save the reader from the realization that the gently maniacal Luzhin is a sentimental stereotype. This time out, Nabokov's butterfly net has brought back only an old chess...