Some of the chess problems are in VN’s Poems and Puzzles. I don’t know offhand whether the specific problem referred to in Conclusive Evidence [Speak, Memory] is one of the ones in Poems and Puzzles. In 1986 I gave a paper, “The Affinity between Nabokov’s Short Stories and Chess Problems,” at the Vladimir Nabokov Society Meeting, Modern Language Association Convention, New York (abstract published in The Nabokovian, 18 [1987]). Therein I argued that novels (or memoirs) and chess problems are very different: chess games, novels and memoirs are developing, sequential narratives, whereas short stories and chess problems depend on single key moves that determine everything else, that the author sets for the reader/solver to figure out.
Pale Fire thus would be sort of a hybrid: it has two more or less sequential narratives, Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s Zemblan fantasy; and is also akin to a chess problem, where the key move is that reader needs to figure out that Kinbote is mad (and/or might be Botkin).
Eric Hyman
Professor of English
Department of English
Butler 133
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301-4252
(910) 672-1901
ehyman@uncfsu.edu
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
[mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Carolyn Kunin
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 7:49 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Chess problem
I was working on a chess problem in the New York Times on Saturday and I did as well as the two winners (both playing black). Which surprized me. But in any event, it got me to thinking about Nabokov as a chess player.
Google led me to an interview done with the author before fame struck, but in 1951, the latest book was ...
a volume called "Conclusive Evidence." It was an autobiography and yet it wasn't altogether so. Would Mr. Nabokov talk a bit about it? He would.
"It is a memoir," he said, "and true. There is a good deal of selection in it, of course. What interested me is the thematic lines of my life that resembles fiction. The memoir became the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story."
Was there any precedent for the memoir that is to some extent manipulated or constructed or conceived as a novel? Mr. Nabokov didn't think too long. "There isn't any precedent that I know of," he said. "It is a literary approach to my own past. There is some precedent for it in the novel, in Proust, say, but not in the memoir. With me," Mr. Nabokov said, "it is a kind of composition. I am a composer of chess problems. Nobody," he said, "has yet solved the chess problem in 'Conclusive Evidence.'" What about a professional, a Reuben Fine, a Reshevsky, or someone like that? "I'm waiting for one to come along," Mr. Nabokov said in a voice that could have been as ambivalent as Joyce's when people were starting to guess at the title of what turned out to be "Finnegans Wake."
Now, as the reader may imagine, the question perhaps not so much begged as raised by all this is does anyone know about the chess problems referred to? are they repeated in Speak, Memory? has anyone solved them?
Carolyn
February 18, 1951 Talk with Mr. Nabokov by Harvey Breit
All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.