The Luzhin Defense (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Nabokov, Vladimir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141185988 ISBN 13: 9780141185989

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2000

Synopsis

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Luzhin Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

About this title

Review:

He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language. (Anthony Burgess)

Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears. (The Guardian)

About the Author:

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0141185988
• ISBN 13: 9780141185989
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192