"Aleksandr Luzhin, the main character from Vladimir Nabokov's "The Luzhin
Defense," was based on real life chess master Curt von Bardeleben who lived from
1861 to 1924. Both the fictional character and the real person were strong chess
players who competed at world championship levels, both were reclusive and
socially awkward, both jumped to their deaths through a window. Curt is most
famous for his game against Steinitz in which he (Carl) left the room instead of
resigning. Apparently Curt didn't like his position here against Steinitz,
because it was his move, and the move he played was leaving the room and never
returning.
I believe there is a correlation between chess and madness--as it
really is an obsession. Whenever I talk to a chess player who has decided to
give up chess I feel a sense of impending doom for them...Curt, or in Nabokov's
novel, the character "Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin" decides that chess is the
reason for his declining state and tries to give it up. Chess creeps back into
his consiousness, however, and he feels it pulling him in. He tries to find the
move that will get him out of the game. He finds that move by throwing himself
to his death."
JM:The commentator above is categorical ("Aleksandr
Luzhin, the main character from Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Luzhin Defense,' was
based on real life chess master Curt von Bardeleben") and "patterns of madness"
is an enticing title for an approach between certain symptoms of
mental illness ("obsession", "repetition") and chess patterns. Like him,
movie director Marleen Gorri (in her film "The Luzhin Defence") reactivated
her notion of "childhood traumas" and neurosis to explain
Luzhin's torments: she ignored Nabokov's warning addressed to
those little freudians who'd find papa and
mama in chess-pieces shaped like kings and queens.
Alan A. Stone ("No Defense") thought that Gorri had operated a frontal
lobotomy on Nabokov's original novel and he valued Nabokov's almost
prophetic perceptiveness (in 1930), in his depiction of Luzhin's behavior
and terrors, since he sees tham as being suggestive of cognitive
disturbances and autistic symptoms, matters which have only recently been
isolated and described.
Citations, like "Chess Fever" and Harold Loyd's "Safety Last," may be
as important in "The Defense" as the influence of Curt von
Bardeleben's suicide on Nabokov's Aleksander Ivanovich,
or over Luzhin's "suimate" .I think that it doesn't
constitute the most marking feature of the novel.
Perhaps the problem lies with entertaining too broad a vision about the
meaning of "patterns" (in life, in mental-illness, in chess, in stars, in
a novel, for Nabokov...)