Complementing the comments to Fran Assa's "Lhuzin never really grows up, does he?  The three points in his life show him as having the same childishness." I'd like to bring up, in the first place, the link to Updike's criticism: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/grandmaster-nabokov

Having read in VN's foreword that "The Defence" was "written in 1929--that is, when Nabokov was thirty, which is the age of Luzhin and that, like "his hero, the author seems older"  John Updike adds "few Americans so young could write a novel wherein the autobiographical elements are so cunningly rearranged and transmuted by a fictional design, and the emotional content so obedient to such cruelly ingenious commands.."
and, several paragraphs later:"Nabokov has always warmed to the subject of children, precocious children--David Krug, Victor Wind, the all-seeing "I" of Conclusive Evidence, and, most precocious and achingly childlike of all, Dolores Haze."
In his eyes (this review has been previously posted in the VN-L, with another set of highlights) "The humanity that has come within Nabokov's rather narrow field of vision has been illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. Two characters occur to me, randomly and vividly: Charlotte Haze of Lolita, with her blatant bourgeois Bohemianism, her cigarettes, her Mexican doodads, her touchingly clumsy sexuality, her utterly savage and believable war with her daughter; and Albinus Kretschmar of Laughter in the Dark, with his doll-like dignity, his bestial softness, his hobbies, his family feelings, his craven romanticism, his quaint competence. An American housewife and a German businessman, both observed, certainly, from well on the outside, yet animated from well within. How much more, then, can Nabokov do with characters who are Russian, and whose concerns circle close to his own aloof passions!"
John Updike also refers to the novel's level "as a work-epic of chess (as Moby Dick is a work-epic of whaling) The Defense is splendidly shaped toward Luzhin's match with Turati...Their game, a potential draw which is never completed, draws forth a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic. Beneath the singing, quivering, trumpeting, humming battlefield of the chessboard, Turati and Luzhin become fabulous monsters groping through unthinkable tunnels": However, after the game is adjourned, "the metaphors have reversed the terms" and "the chess-images that have haunted the fringes of his [Luzhin's] existence now move into the center and render the real world phantasmal." Nabokov's tormented character "is lovable, this child within a monster, this "chess moron," and we want him to go on, to finish his classic game with Turati, and, win or lose, to play other games... He seems blocked by something outside the novel, perhaps by the lepidopterist's habit of killing what it loves; how remarkably few, after all, of Nabokov's characters do evade the mounting pin."
 
The same ambition that stimulates John Shade in 1962 ("It sufficed that I in life could find/...some kind/Of correlated pattern in the game,/Plexed artistry, and something of the same/ Pleasure in it as they who played it found//...Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns/ To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns...") seems to have been spotted by John Updike as being already at work in this early Russian novel: "Nabokov's exacting criteria of artistic performance...in a memorable section in Conclusive Evidence concerning butterflies," ..."relates to the 'mysteries of mimicry'..."   In this case, the lines about "plexed artistry" might indicate such "mysteries of mimicry" when an artist, like a playful god, relates his scientific findings to art.
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