5

He played in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Odessa. There appeared a certain Valentinov, a cross between tutor and manager. Luzhin senior wore a black armband—mourning for his wife—and told provincial journalists that he would never have made such a thorough survey of his native land had he not had a prodigy for a son.

He battled at tournaments with the best Russian players. He often took on a score of amateurs. Sometimes he played blind. Luzhin senior, many years later (in the years when his every contribution to émigré newspapers seemed to him to be his swan song—and goodness knows how many of these swan songs there were, full of lyricism and misprints) planned to write a novella about precisely such a chess-playing small boy, who was taken from city to city by his father (foster father in the novella). He began to write it in 1928—after returning home from a meeting of the Union of Émigré Writers, at which he had been the only one to turn up. The idea of the book came to him unexpectedly and vividly, as he was sitting and waiting in the conference room of a Berlin coffeehouse. As usual he had come very early, expressed surprise that the tables had not been placed together, told the waiter to do this immediately and ordered tea and a pony of brandy. The room was clean and brightly lit, with a still life on the wall representing plump peaches around a watermelon minus one wedge. A clean tablecloth ballooned gently and settled over the connected tables. He put a lump of sugar in his tea and watching the bubbles rise, warmed his bloodless, always cold hands on the glass. Nearby in the bar a violin and piano were playing selections from La Traviata—and the sweet music, the brandy, the whiteness of the clean tablecloth—all this made old Luzhin so sad, and this sadness was so pleasant, that he was loath to move: so he just sat there, one elbow propped on the table, a finger pressed to his temple—a gaunt, red-eyed old man wearing a knitted waistcoat under his brown jacket. The music played, the empty room was flooded with light, the wound of the watermelon glowed scarlet—and nobody seemed to be coming to the meeting. Several times he looked at his watch, but then the tea and the music bemisted him so mellowly that he forgot about time. He sat quietly thinking about this and that—about a typewriter he had acquired secondhand, about the Marinsky Theater, about the son who so rarely came to Berlin. And then he suddenly realized that he had been sitting there for an hour, that the tablecloth was still just as bare and white.… And in this luminous solitude that seemed to him almost mystical, sitting at a table prepared for a meeting that did not take place, he forthwith decided that after a long absence literary inspiration had revisited him.

Time to do a little summing up, he thought and looked round the empty room—tablecloth, blue wallpaper, still life—the way one looks at a room where a famous man was born. And old Luzhin mentally invited his future biographer (who as one came nearer to him in time became paradoxically more and more insubstantial, more and more remote) to take a good close look at this chance room where the novella The Gambit had been evolved. He drank the rest of his tea in one gulp, donned his coat and hat, learned from the waiter that today was Tuesday and not Wednesday, smiled not without a certain satisfaction over his own absentmindedness and immediately upon returning home removed the black metal cover from his typewriter.

The most vivid thing standing before his eyes was the following recollection (slightly retouched by a writer’s imagination): a bright hall, two rows of tables, chessboards on the tables. A person sits at each table and at the back of each sitter spectators stand in a cluster, craning their necks. And now down the aisle between the tables, looking at no one, hurries a small boy—dressed like the Tsarevich in an elegant white sailor suit. He stops in turn at each board and quickly makes a move or else lapses briefly in thought, inclining his golden-brown head. An onlooker knowing nothing about simultaneous chess would be utterly baffled at the sight of these elderly men in black sitting gloomily behind boards that bristle thickly with curiously cut manikins, while a nimble, smartly dressed lad whose presence here is inexplicable walks lightly from table to table in the strange, tense silence, the only one to move among these petrified people.…

The writer Luzhin did not himself notice the stylized nature of his recollection. Nor did he notice that he had endowed his son with the features of a musical rather than a chess-playing prodigy, the result being both sickly and angelic—eyes strangely veiled, curly hair, and a transparent pallor. But now he was faced with certain difficulties: this image of his son, purged of all alien matter and carried to the limits of tenderness, had to be surrounded with some sort of habitus. One thing he decided for sure—he would not let this child grow up, would not transform him into that tactiturn person who sometimes called upon him in Berlin, replied to questions monosyllabically, sat there with his eyes half closed, and then went away leaving an envelope with money in it on the windowsill.

“He will die young,” he said aloud, pacing restlessly about the room and around the open typewriter, whose keys were all watching him with their pupils of reflected light. “Yes, he will die young, his death will be logical and very moving. He will die in bed while playing his last game.” He was so taken with this thought that he regretted the impossibility of beginning the writing of the book from the end. But as a matter of fact, why was it impossible? One could try.… He started to guide his thought backwards—from this touching and so distinct death back to his hero’s vague origin, but presently he thought better of it and sat down at his desk to ponder anew.

His son’s gift had developed in full only after the war when the Wunderkind turned into the maestro. In 1914, on the very eve of that war which so hindered his memories from ministering to a neat literary plot, he had again gone abroad with his son, and Valentinov went too. Little Luzhin was invited to play in Vienna, Budapest and Rome. The fame of the Russian boy who had already beaten one or two of those players whose names appear in chess textbooks was growing so fast that his own modest literary fame was also being incidentally alluded to in foreign newspapers. All three of them were in Switzerland when the Austrian archduke was killed. Out of quite casual considerations (the notion that the mountain air was good for his son … Valentinov’s remark that Russia now had no time for chess, while his son was kept alive solely by chess … the thought that the war would not last for long) he had returned to St. Petersburg alone. After a few months he could stand it no longer and sent for his son. In a bizarre, orotund letter that was somehow matched by its roundabout journey, Valentinov informed him that his son did not wish to come. Luzhin wrote again and the reply, just as orotund and polite, came not from Tarasp but from Naples. He began to loathe Valentinov. There were days of extraordinary anguish. There were absurd complications with the transfer of money. However, Valentinov proposed in one of his next letters to assume all the costs of the boy’s maintenance himself—they would settle up later. Time passed. In the unexpected role of war correspondent he found himself in the Caucasus. Days of anguish and keen hatred for Valentinov (who wrote, however, diligently) were followed by days of mental peace derived from the feeling that life abroad was good for his son—better than it would have been in Russia (which was precisely what Valentinov affirmed).

Now, a decade and a half later, these war years turned out to be an exasperating obstacle; they seemed an encroachment upon creative freedom, for in every book describing the gradual development of a given human personality one had somehow to mention the war, and even the hero’s dying in his youth could not provide a way out of this situation. There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background. With the revolution it was even worse. The general opinion was that it had influenced the course of every Russian’s life; an author could not have his hero go through it without getting scorched, and to dodge it was impossible. This amounted to a genuine violation of the writer’s free will. Actually, how could the revolution affect his son? On the long-awaited day in the fall of nineteen hundred and seventeen Valentinov appeared, just as cheerful, loud and magnificently dressed as before, and behind him was a pudgy young man with a rudimentary mustache. There was a moment of sorrow, embarrassment and strange disillusionment. The son hardly spoke and kept glancing askance at the window (“He’s afraid there might be some shooting,” explained Valentinov in a low voice). All this resembled a bad dream at first—but one gets used to everything. Valentinov continued to assert that whatever was owed him could be settled “among friends” later. It turned out that he had important secret business affairs and money tucked away in all the banks of allied Europe. Young Luzhin began to frequent an eminently quiet chess club that had trustfully blossomed forth at the very height of civil chaos, and in spring, together with Valentinov, he disappeared—once more abroad. After this came recollections that were purely personal, unbidden recollections, of no use to him—starvation, arrest, and so forth, and suddenly—legal exile, blessed expulsion, the clean yellow deck, the Baltic breeze, the discussion with Professor Vasilenko over the immortality of the soul.

Out of all this, out of all this crude mish-mash that stuck to the pen and tumbled out of every corner of his memory, degrading every recollection and blocking the way for free thought, he was unavoidably compelled to extract—carefully and piece by piece—and admit whole to his book—Valentinov. A man of undoubted talent, as he was characterized by those who were about to say something nasty about him; an odd fellow, a Jack-of-all-trades, an indispensable man for the organization of amateur shows, engineer, superb mathematician, chess and checkers enthusiast, and “the amusingest gentleman,” in the words of his own recommendation. He had wonderful brown eyes and an extraordinarily attractive laugh. On his index finger he wore a death’s head ring and he gave one to understand that there had been duels in his life. At one time he had taught calisthenics in little Luzhin’s school, and pupils and teachers alike had been much impressed by the fact that a mysterious lady used to come for him in a limousine. He invented in passing an amazing metallic pavement that was tried in St. Petersburg on the Nevsky, near Kazan Cathedral. He had composed several clever chess problems and was the first exponent of the so-called “Russian” theme. He was twenty-eight the year war was declared and suffered from no illness. The anemic word “deserter” somehow did not suit this cheerful, sturdy, agile man; no other word, however, can be found for it. What he did abroad during the war remained unknown.

And so Luzhin the writer decided to utilize him in full; thanks to his presence any story acquired extraordinary liveliness, a smack of adventure. But the most important part still remained to be invented. Everything he had up to now was the coloration—warm and vivid, on doubt, but floating in separate spots; he had still to find a definite design, a sharp line. For the first time the writer Luzhin had involuntarily begun with the colors.

And the brighter these colors became in his mind the harder it was to sit down at the typewriter. A month went by, another, the summer began, and still he continued to clothe his yet invisible theme in the most festive hues. Sometimes it seemed to him that the book was already written and he clearly saw the set-up type; the galley proof scrolls with red hieroglyphs in the margin, and then the advance copy, so fresh and crisp to the touch; and beyond that was a marvelous mist, delectable rewards for all his failures, for all the fickleness of fame. He visited his numerous acquaintances and lengthily, with great gusto, spoke of his coming book. One émigré newspaper printed a note to the effect that after a long silence he was working on a new tale. And this note, which he himself had written and sent in, he excitedly read over three times and then cut out and placed in his wallet. He began to appear with greater frequency at literary evenings, and he supposed that everyone must be looking at him with curiosity and respect. Once, on a treacherous summer day, he went to a suburban wood, got soaked in a sudden downpour while vainly looking for boletes, and the following day took to his bed. He ailed briefly and lonesomely, and his end was not pacific. The board of the Union of Émigré Writers honored his memory with a minute of silence.