Luzhin's Defense
by Vladislav Khodasevich
translated from the Russian by Jeff Edmunds
page two of two

The artist is doomed to sojourn in two worlds: in the real world and in the world of art he himself has created. The true master is always to be found at that line belonging to both worlds, where their planes intersect. Alienation from reality, absolute immersion in the world of art, where there is no flight, but only endless falling, is madness. It threatens the honest dilettante, but does not threaten the master, possessed of the gift of finding and never again losing the line of intersection. Genius is measure, harmony, perpetual balance.

Luzhin is no genius. But neither is he ungifted. He is no more than a great talent. In the beginning this is enough: in the capacity of a prodigy he irresponsibly, but sinlessly imitates genius, as a child imitates an adult. But farther on, the path is closed to him, the catastrophe inevitable. Valentinov is wise, for he foresees this. “Sparkle while you can” he tells Luzhin, and abandons him at precisely the moment when sparkle alone, the imitation of genius alone is becoming insufficient. Luzhin’s fate is sealed. He does not find harmony. A diver without diving gear, “a mere earthen vessel,”2 having braved the path of true creation, forbidden to the talented and within the powers of genius, the prodigy, having gazed into “the abyss of chess,” ends up being engulfed by it.

Madness is his rightful destiny, in which there is something ennobling, as there is something ennobling in Phaeton’s fall. Luzhin deserved the honor of being called a victim of art. In madness, in the unceasing fall through the abyss of chess, he probably would have found a peculiar happiness; he is fully adapted to the safe habitation in this inhospitable world. But they cured him, extracted him thence—into a new ordeal. He is compelled to walk the arduous path of incarnation a second time. His fiancée nurses him back to health and marries him. Chess is hidden from him and he is shielded from any recollection of the game. Again he becomes an automaton among people. But the world of art and madness does not relinquish its victim. In the second cycle of Luzhin’s existence, all the events of the first are repeated, this time tenfold more rapidly. Finally there occurs Luzhin’s second, literal and definitive, fall out of reality. Having locked himself in the bathroom away from his guests and and his wife, he throws himself from the window into a Berlin courtyard. Sirin ends the story with a superb device: only at this moment does the reader learn that to this strange being there belonged a human, personal name, apart from the chess one.

“The door was burst in. ‘Aleksandr Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich,’ roared several voices.

But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich.”

People seeking amusement or idle relaxation in literature are nowadays appearing in larger numbers than before, an indication of a backward or declining culture. In Sirin’s novel (which, incidentally, I would sooner have called a tale: it lacks a novel’s breadth of subject matter) they will find little for themselves. But artistically educated minds will derive from this book, with its sombre subject, pure joy and mental solace: genuine art is always consoling, no matter how the author sees the world and whatever the hero’s fate.

Luzhin’s story is told with well-considered ease. It is written without pressure, with a light and gliding hand. At times what is most important is given as if in passing, the unexpected inwardly justified and painstakingly prepared. But we know that it is only by means of laborious work that the seemingly effortless is attained. Work is palpable in Sirin’s book. There is in it that noble artificiality which inevitably and necessarily accompanies all art. Laymen and dilettantes are daunted by it; the master cannot work without it. Sirin’s novel is “crafted,” but such “craft” is not accessible to everyone. The young writer is to be congratulated for a great success. It is not without reason that even before the book’s appearance, when the novel was published in installments in Sovremennye zapiski, a contemptibly envious clamor was already resounding around him.

English translation ©copyright 1997 by Jeff Edmunds

2. “Sosud skudel’nyi” [earthen vessel] is an archaic expression used in the Russian Bible and elsewhere as a metaphor for the fragile human body, made of clay and dust. See, for example, 2 Cor. 4:7.