Exploring Symbolism and Imagery in Nabokov’s “The Defense of Luzhin” | October 22 2024, 00:29

I am currently reading Nabokov’s “The Defense of Luzhin”, and in the preface by the author, there is a sentence of 269 words.

“Here, by the way, to save time and effort for the sworn reviewers – and generally for people who read with moving lips and from whom one cannot expect to engage with a novel devoid of dialogues, when so much can be gleaned from its preface – I would like to draw their attention to the first occurrence, already in the eleventh chapter, of the motif of matte (‘as if frosted’) window glass (connected with suicide or rather, a self-administered checkmate by Luzhin); or to how touchingly my gloomy grandmaster recalls his travels for professional needs: not in the form of sunny, colorful luggage labels or slides of a magic lantern, but in the form of tiled tiles in different hotel baths and toilets – such as, for example, the floor in white and blue squares, where, from the height of his throne, he found and tested imagined continuations of a tournament game begun; or irritably asymmetrical – called ‘agate’ in sale – pattern, in which three harlequin-vivid colors zigzag – like a knight’s move – here and there interrupting the neutral tone properly mapped out in the rest of the laid linoleum, spreading between our Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ and the door; or the large glossy-black and yellow rectangles with ‘h’ line, painfully cut by the ochre vertical of a hot water pipe; or that luxurious water closet, in the delightful marble mosaic of which he recognized a vague, but fully preserved outline of exactly the position that, propping his chin with his fist, he pondered over one night many years ago.”