Echoes of the Russo-Japanese War in the Works of Vladimir Nabokov
by Rusina Volkova
"The Luzhin Defense" has been traditionally attributed to the genre of
"Schachnovelle".[1] However, the method of Rorschach blots (the German
psychologist with a "chess name" Rohr Schach), may help define the internal
content of the subject (in this case - the reader) by means of free association with
the pattern (in this case – the text).
This novel may be read as the “The Royal Game”, or as a story about the passion
for a game, gambling a la Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”, or Gogol’s “The Players”.
My understanding of this novel is that of a war saga, where the main character is a
personified mythological image of the Port Arthur fortress, more commonly known
by its Chinese name of Lushun [2].
Leo Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace” showed Napoleon on the eve of the battle of
Borodino, when he had announced that "the chessmen are set up”. So for him as
．
．
for many other conquerors, tsars or kings, real people were like chess pieces and
pawns. We know what was the end of Napoleon’s ambitious plans: he failed and
he fell. As Pushkin wrote in “Eugene Onegin”: “We all possess Napoleon’s
features/The millions of two-legged creatures/Are only instruments and tools”. [3]
As we can see, Russian writers understood that a war, for those who were in
power, was like any military game with “human bullets”, so for them it could be a
substitute for a game of chess or like a game with toy soldiers. Chess was a very
popular game among Russian elite at that time. Tsar Nicolas II and War Minister
Kuropatkin were famous for their great interest in chess playing. There were even
some rumors (not confirmed, but widely circulated in Russian press), that the Tsar
sent a very expensive Faberge chess set to Kuropatkin when he was at the Far East
field.
The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 could be a classical example of playing chess
with real-life figures and pawns. Instead of a checkerboard, this “Royal Game”
between two kings – Nicholas the Second and Mikado – took place on a lined map
of the Pacific region, where the 38th parallel was the center of a “board” that
divided the two armies. On the Russian side we had our Chief Commander
A.N.Kuropatkin, the Japanese side was headed by General Kuroki. We can
mention the battle of Shakhe river. The Russian rook was the fort of Port Arthur,
and in Russian terminology rook is also a warship (“ladya” in Russian), which
should protect the fort. We had army bishops and their Russian equivalents, i.e.
officers, knights and pawns were fighting on both sides. But in this strange game
black knights - special troopers, “chets” - from Montenegro (in Russian: from “the
Country of Black Mountains”) were fighting for the “White King”. And we can
also see how journalist Nozhin [4], while inside the fort and through the poorly
censored newspaper, revealed military secrets to General Nogi, who stayed outside
the lines of Lushun’s defense. I could give more examples of checkerboard mirror
reflection of the two sides in this war.
The main military operations of that war were all about the defense of Lushun by
the Russians using various military means, and the Japanese efforts to fell it. So it
was a real chess game with live figures where Lushun (Luzhin) was trying to build
a strong defense from the Japanese military machine and its War Minister Terauchi
(Turati).
In the novel Nabokov imitated the defense of Port Arthur (Lushun) by building
several lines of his own "Luzhin’s defense".
The first line – Luzhin on the defense of himself.
We trace the hero's life from birth to death. His year of birth – 1898 (the year
when Russia signed an agreement to lease Lushun from China for 25 years).
Nabokov dresses young Luzhin in a sailor suit because of the fashion of those
years; his “mother floats somewhere in the depths of the house"; "father with
feigned interest" knocks "on the glass barometer, where the arrow is always
standing on the storm"; the French governess read aloud a book about the
misadventures of a sailor, Dantes, and his escape from the fortress prison. Other
boys who came to his house are also dressed as sailors; one of them had the last
name of Rosen, the Russian minister to Japan during the war and Ambassador to
the U.S. at the time of the Treaty of Portsmouth (K.D.Nabokov was a member of
the Russian delegation there). In his 1967 interview to “Paris Review” Nabokov
said: “My characters are galley slaves” (SO, 95) [5]
We can also very easily find the names of the Russian ships, which Nabokov
sometimes used almost openly, like Tsesarevich, Pallada, Truvor, Sineus [6], or
through the changing forms of their names within the corpse of the novel, like
Petropavlovsk (cannon of the Peter and Paul fortress), Gromoboy (one of Luzhin’s
classmates, Gromov), etc.
2
Almost every page of the novel is full of Far East, or Oriental style details: the
Japanese silk screen in Luzhin’s aunt house with the typical reeds and storks motif;
his bride’s house in
St. Petersburg with “mysterious orange tree blossoms”; Luzhin’s father with a fan
of tickets in his hands; Luzhin’s meeting with Amur (a mythical personification of
the Far East river); red vertical hieroglyphs in the margins of Luzhin’s father’s
proof scrolls, etc.
Luzhin as a child felt the aggressiveness of the outside world. So he tried to build
an invisible wall between himself and the other world. And he did it with the help
of a checkerboard; this became his world, his fortress. But inside this “other world”
there were some holes, some weak places of defense, because he was not alone
there and needed to share this space with other chess players, like the aggressive
Turati (Japanese war minister Terauchi). As Luzhin’s power for such protection
weakened with age, he suffered a nervous breakdown [7].
The last day of his life was very dramatic. He needed to escape. First he stopped
(“full stopped” as in navy command), said good-bye to his wife, looking at her legs
(in Russian: at her “nogi”. Nogi – the name of the Japanese admiral who captured
Lushun) [6]. And his final stage of defense was “a big fall” as in “HumptyDumpty” – “all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put him together
again” [8].
Several years after the fall of Port Arthur, one of the “king’s men”- “the black
knight” from Montenegro, Captain Alexander Saichich (not Aleksandr Ivanovich,
but one of his prototypes), whose last name looks like an anagram of schach),
suffered a “great fall”. The former commander of a squadron of Amur Dragoons
Regiment, in 1911 he jumped out of the King’s Palace in Tsetin, trying to escape
from a fire, and died.
Why then didn’t Luzhin’s death occur in 1905, when the fort was surrendered, or
in 1911? As we know, according to the novel it happened either in 1928 or in
1929. Where is the logic? In his novel "Pnin" Nabokov used Tolstoy’s “Anna
Karenina” as an example to explain that "time in a novel” does not coincide with
historic time, it has its own logic and measures.
Second line – the legal defense of generals and admirals of the Russian Army and
Navy who let Port Arthur and Russian fleet be seized by the Japanese military
without the last fight.
3
Immediately after the war all these men returned to Russia as heroes and were
decorated by the Tsar. But then, under the pressure of public opinion which was
dissatisfied with the shameful defeat in the war, they were put on trial.
One of the main issues at the court was the question of betrayal: did Port Arthur
fall for valid reasons, or because of treason? Was it possible not to surrender the
ships of the Russian squadron and find a more honorable way out of the situation?
All the accused were facing the death penalty, so the trials took a long time and
involved numerous witnesses and the best defense lawyers of the time. Trial details
were fully covered in the press, and impressive speeches of the lawyers became
highly popular, with some phrases becoming proverbial.
One of the lawyers at the trial of General Stessel, who surrendered Port Arthur to
Admiral Nogi, and the same barrister at the trial of 77 officers of Admiral
Nebogatov’s squadron (Tsushima defeat) was Mr. Ali-Schach-Oskar Syrtlanov, a
well-known jurist and a member of the State Duma (Russian Parliament) who was
also a nobleman and a retired colonel. Nabokov quoted his speech at the end of his
novel. According to Syrtlanov, General Stessel could not be accused of the
surrender of the fortress (in military legal code it meant the death penalty), because
"there was no fortress of Port Arthur".[9]
It was obvious that the Russian military were ill-prepared for the war. They
planned to build the defense of Port Arthur (which at that time did not meet the
requirements of a fort in the military sense) only by 1909. So the needed lines of
defense had to be built in a hurry, under enemy fire. Before the war, General
Stessel was the commandant of the civil city of Port Arthur, not of a military fort.
During the siege that lasted for 329 days, he and some other generals and ranking
officers of the fort probably did not act very professionally, but neither did the
higher commanders like Chief Commander Kuropatkin, who shocked the Japanese
military and foreign observers with his incompetence. The same could be said
about other “big figures”, including the Tsar himself.
However, despite the strong logic of the defense team and their proof of innocence
of the accused, Port Arthur’s Generals Stessel, Fok, Smirnov, and Reis were
sentenced to death for cowardice and dereliction of duty.
Admiral Nebogatov, and Captains Lishin, Grigoriev, and Smirnov were also
sentenced to death by firing squad for the surrender of the fleet to the enemy. The
Tsar commuted these sentences to imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
4
They survived the incarceration and were released sooner than expected. But their
defender Syrtlanov was tragically killed in 1912 by his father-in-law, MajorGeneral Scheich Ali, "by negligence". While few at that time believed in this
"negligence", the case was quickly closed and nobody was accused.
When Nabokov was writing “Luzhin’s Defense”, the widow of Mr. Syrtlanov,
Amina Syrtlanova [10] , nee Scheich-Ali, lived in Paris. She was a theosophist and
an active member of the Masonic Lodge "Aurora" (the name of a cruiser of the 2nd
Pacific squadron during the Russo Japanese War, that later became the symbol of
the Revolution of 1917) [11]. The lodge was frequented by member and artist
Victor Savinkov, a brother of the famous terrorist and writer Boris Savinkov,
author of "The Pale Horse" (1913) and "The Black Horse" (1923). According to
the official version, in 1925, after being arrested by the Soviet Secret Service,
B.Savinkov chose to commit suicide by jumping out of a window into the Cheka
(another anagram of check) prison courtyard in Moscow.
Some other participants of the above-mentioned military trials also lived in Paris in
the late 1920s. Among them were Nabokov’s uncle Vice-Admiral N.Kolomeitsev,
who was one of the witnesses at the trial of Admiral Nebogatov and his three
captains, and the famous Russian barrister M.Kazarinov, along with Syrtlanov
presented for the defense in the same trial. So Nabokov could easily restore the
picture of the trials of his childhood in detail. [12]
The defense lawyers belonged to the liberal intelligentsia of Nabokov’s childhood,
a close circle of his father’s friends who believed the defeat in the war should be
primarily blamed on those who started it rather than those who “lost the game”.
This is why the main line of defense was that the accused could not be tried as
military criminals, because they just wanted to save the lives of their subordinates.
By the same token, the Russian public ought to admire their humanism instead of
blaming them for treason.
The trial of General Stessel and others who surrendered Port Arthur ended in
February 1908. At exactly the same time one strange impresario, M.Valentinov,
within his enterprise [13] brought to Russia a relatively new Puccini's opera
"Madame Butterfly," which was performed in Italian at the Great Hall of the St.
Petersburg Conservatory [14]. After the widely discussed trial had been over, and
liberals stood up for the military men, who lost the war "based on the principles of
humanism", the Russian audience had a chance to see the truth from the Japanese
side: a small, fragile, defenseless woman prefers to commit suicide rather than live
5
in dishonor. And this moral credo shocked those, who yesterday applauded the
generals and admirals without “real guts”.
“"The Japanese would have never surrendered”, said the Prosecutor. “Maybe he is
right, but the wide European culture of humanity should not blush and bow to the
narrow bigotry of Asian men” [15] - arrogantly quoted the defense lawyer
M.G.Kazarinov. The young Madame Butterfly gave him a clear answer: “Who
cannot live with honor must die with honor”.
The third line of defense – defense from public opinion (case of Captain
N.G.Lishin)
All of the accused “king’s men” were indeed spared by the Tsar but their
reputation was shattered for good. This is the story about one of them, which was
probably “the last blot” (Rorschach blots) that prompted Nabokov to start his war
novel in 1929.
In November 1928 the "Journal of Maritime" published in Prague by Lieutenant
M.S. Stakhevich [16] printed a letter about the fate of former Captain N.G.Lishin,
convicted in 1906 by the Trial of Nebogatov’s Squadron. "While stripped of his
rank, noble status and awards and convicted to 10 years in prison, former 1st rank
Captain Lichin was left even by his wife. When the Great War started, he filed a
petition to his Majesty for permission to go to the front as a private volunteer… He
got four highest soldier awards – “St. George Crosses”… His Majesty pardoned
Nikolai Georgievich and returned everything he had lost because of the trial… I
want to hope that the fate of 1st rank Captain N.G.Lishin during the period from
1906 to 1915, his bravery at the war front in the lower military rank could mellow
my beloved native Navy as they did the deceased Emperor”. [17]
The letter was written by a relative of the former captain from Riga, who did not
know that N.G.Lishin passed away in 1923 in Pozharevats, Yugoslavia. It was
known only to those in the circles of Paris, Berlin or Prague emigration (where
Nabokov was inspired to write the novel), who was close to Russian military
organizations in Yugoslavia and continued to be interested in news from Serbian
newspapers. So in Paris it could be V.E.Kokoshkina, the infamous mother of
Nabokov’s “beau” Irina Guagdanini, welcoming hostess of many Russian
emigrants. At the beginning of the 1920s the Kokoshkins lived in Belgrade, after
the death of her husband, V.F.Kokoshkin, in 1926 in Brussels, V. Kokoshkina and
her daughter moved from Brussels to Paris.
6
They were surrounded with their Belgrade friends like the brother Admirals
Shevelevs, one of which – Klavdii Petrovich (according to memoires of one of the
relatives of the Guagdanini family, Prof. Olga Matich) had a crush on all the girls
of Guagdanini family.[18]There was also Admiral B.Aprelev, son of Russian
writer for youth E.Ardov, who died in Belgrade in 1923. Of course all of them,
former participants in the Russo-Japanese war, knew about the fate of a poor
Captain Lishin, and probably even fell sorry for him. These Admirals were the
members of The Russian Navy Society in Paris together with Nabokov’s uncle,
N.Kolomoitsev, and Admiral Alexander Ivanovich Rusin, whose last name sounds
very close to the Japanese pronunciation of Luzhin’s last name. [19]
"I rarely see Russian newspapers,” - said Mrs. Luzhin. “Mamma, for instance, gets
a Russian newspaper from Serbia, I believe -“… “That is, if you want to talk about
it with my parents somehow". (D, 211)
There is little doubt that we are speaking about the Kokoshkins. Two episodes in
the book definitely led us to this family.
“The first thing Luzhin saw was his mother-in-law, looking much younger, rosy
red, and wearing a magnificent, sparkling headdress – a Russian woman’s
kokoshnik”. (D, 194)
And this is more obvious that Nabokov used a reminiscence of an old article
written in 1838 by V.A. Zhukovsky: "Fire in the Winter Palace" (another fire in
King Palaces!).The main protagonists of the story were Tsar Nicholas I, his
adjutant Ivan Luzhin and the Chief of Police Kokoshkin. All the characters were
real persons. The article can be viewed as a parody of decision-making in Russia,
where any action, even obvious, for example, the call for firefighters to extinguish
the fire, demanded instructions from the Tsar himself.
"Petrov leaned over to Mrs. Luzhin and whispered a quotation from Zhukovsky:
"That which took pains to write is read with ease". (D, 232)
The defeat in the Russo-Japanese war was due to a complete atrophy of will by
senior military staff, when no one wanted to take responsibility. All actions of
Chief Commander Kuropatkin in fact were inactions. His “chess defense” in “The
Royal Game” could be described as a passive Philidor Gambit, when the last move
of white is creating pawn tension on the Black King’s side by the weakening of his
own White Tsar.
7
Passive defense was the main Russian tactic during that war. It could be said about
the Viceroy in the Far East Y.I. Alekseyev, and about many other generals,
admirals, mid-level commanders and even soldiers (with rare exception, which
only reinforced the general rule). The British military attaché at Kuroki Army,
Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote: "Just when the moment came to make
the desperate, decisive effort, a strong lethargy, a sort of will paralysis, seems to
have fallen upon the Russians…It is passing strange that soldiers so steady and
formidable in retreat should be so low and so sticky in the attack” [20]
So with the small rearrangement of letters we came from Luzhin to Lushun and
Lishin.
And yet the novel was about Luzhin. Russian problems with Japan did not begin
with Manchuria and Korea in the early twentieth century, they started about 200
years before that, when Peter the Great sent a Far East expedition (1719-1721) of
geodesists and cartographers Fyodor Luzhin and Ivan Evreinov.[21] For the first
time in the history of geographу they mapped 14 of the Kuril Islands based on
instrumental recording. It was the first "footprint", the first documented intrusion
into the sphere of interests of Japan. At the same time this expedition strengthened
the interests of the Russian empire at the Far East. The third Kuril Strait separating
the Antsiferov Island from the Paramushir Island is called the Strait of Luzhin.
It looks like lawyer Syrtlanov was wrong in 1908, when he announced what was
very popular among Russian liberals opinion, that Russia’s lease of Port Arthur
and the military activities around the fort were the main reasons of the war and of
the defeat: “Prosecutor thinks, that if there was not Arthur, then Nebogatov’s
surrender never happened, and there was not defeat at Mukden. But I say more
about it: if there was not Arthur – the war never happened”.[22] Unfortunately, this
was not the only illusion which the pre-revolution generation of Russian liberals,
like V.D.Nabokov, shared at that time.
When Nabokov published the translation of the novel in English, there were
already several repeats of the same pattern in the Pacific theatre of war, like Pearl
Harbor and Korean War. That is why in his Foreword to the American edition he
said that the name Luzhin “rhymes with “illusion” (D, 7).
Nabokov could estimate the wise prediction of Russian military experts in the Paris
emigration who predicted all of these clashes of interests. In 1922 his uncle
K.D.Nabokov translated into English the book by General N.Golovin, in
collaboration with Admiral A.Bubnov (one more member of Russian Navy
8
Society in Paris), “The problem of the Pacific in the Twentieth Century”, where in
the author’s Foreword was said: In no other sphere of human activities are people
as prone to nourish illusions as in the domain of phenomena affecting the
commonwealth as a whole. To nourish such illusions is, however, as dangerous an
error as to approach a precipice blindfolded. For this reason the author has aimed
chiefly at restricting himself to the realm of realities in dealing with the problem of
the Pacific. One of these realities is the necessity of all international agreements
being backed by actual force”. [23]
Despite the authors accurate predictions of the future conflicts in the Pacific
region, they also had some illusions about international possibilities to stop war
conflicts. It was obvious to Nabokov, who was a man with a practical, almost
cynical, mind.
Sources from Nabokov:
D – Defense. Translated by M.Scammell in collaboration with the author.
G.P.Putnam’s Sons, N.Y., 1964
SO – Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973
SM- Speak, Memory. G.P.Putnam’s Sons. N.Y., 1966
________________________________________
[1] For his “word game” Nabokov used chess terminology in English, German and
Russian. Specially it concern the word check (English) and Schach (German).
[2] Russian military men called the fort simply “Arthur”, and spoke about it as
about an important person, whom they needed to protect. The same personification
was popular among Russian emigration in China, where they called cities of
Harbin and Shanghai as “Harbin-papa” and “Shanghai-mama”.
[3] A.S.Pushkin. Eugene Onegin. Translation by A.S.Kline, 2009
One of the reasons why Nabokov was against poetic translation of “Evgeniy
Onegin” was the impossibility of playing with the metaphors and polisemy of the
Russian words. For example, the Russian word ‘orudie’ could be “tool” but at the
9
same time it could be “cannon”. So in this case, Pushkin tried to add additional
sense for his words.
[4] His last name was based on a Russian word ‘noga’ (foot) – plural form will be
nogi (feet).
[5] All seamen in the Russian Navy were conscripts.
[6] “Completely featureless Sineus and Truvor” (D, p.17) were two torpedo-boats
from the armored cruiser Rurik, which were sunk together with the ship at the
Battle of Ulsan in the Russo-Japanese War.
[7] Doctors observed that the lengthy defense of Port Arthur caused nervous and
mental diseases in the garrison. Cf. "The Red Laugh" by L. Andreev.
[8] "Nogi" (in Russian this is the same word for legs and feet) are mentioned in the
novel about 20 times: "his legs from hips to heels were tightly filled with lead, the
way the base of a chessman is weighted”(D, 143), “the bride's feet were witnesses
of his victory; "stepping on someone else's feet", etc.
In an interview in 1966, with characteristic irony, Nabokov denied any allegory in
the novel: "Ignore allegories. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not
your own footprint” (Strong Opinion, 66). In military terms "footprint" means the
invasion of alien territory, and "footprint" in Russian means "print of a foot" (print
of “nogi”).
[9] In Russian: The Case of the surrender of the fortress of Port Arthur to Japanese
troops in 1904. Record of the Trial edited by V. A. Apushkin, 1908, p. 423
[10] It looks like she could be a possible addressee of a strange letter, which
Luzhin typed at the office of his father-in-law: "You are wanted on a charge of
murder. Today is November 27th (day of the beginning of the trial of Port Arthur
surrenders in 1907 in Peterburg– R.V.). .. The body has been found ... Today
police will come!" Some pages before this episode, Luzhin’s future mother-in-law
saw "a lifeless body that her husband, groaning and muttering, was supporting, and
the large awful head that lay on her daughter’s shoulder".
[11] The masonic theme runs through "The Luzhin Defense". "Aurora" was the
first and only national Russian lodge in France, organized by mainly Russian
intellectuals. It is possible that Nabokov was offered membership. In any case, he
knew of its existence and some members.
10
Luzhin’s mother-in-law assumed that the game of chess for him was just a cover
for Masonic activities. Mr. Smirnovski, a theosophist, "disclosed to him… the
secret machinations of the Masons" (D, 175)
[12] In Nabokov’s autobiographical books like “Speak, Memory” we can find the
names of the participants of this war from its “casus belli” (Wonlar-Larsky) to the
Treaty of Portsmouth (K.D. Nabokov). Admiral N.N. Kolomoitsev was a stepfather of Nabokov’s best friend and cousin Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg. Chief
Commander A.N. Kuropatkin was a close associate of his father, etc. First
memories of Nabokov’s childhood were about the time of the Russo-Japanese war.
(SM) So this war came through his house in different ways.
[13] There appeared a certain Valentinov, a cross between tutor and manager"(D,
75), "a man of undoubted talent ... an indispensable man for the organization of
amateur shows"(D, 81)
[14] I am almost sure that Vladimir Nabokov's father was present at the
performance, he was a person who never missed the opera novelties.
[15] In Russian: Trial of Admiral Nebogatov. 1907, p. 200
[16] I think that M.S.Stahevich was a prototype of the main character of
Nabokov's "Torpid Smoke" (1935), that is why Nabokov put "The Luzhin
Defense" on the book shelf of his hero.
[17] In Russian: Maritime Journal, Prague, 1928, N 11, November, p. 255
[18] In Russian: O.Matich. Klavdii Valentinovich Shevelev. http://sovun.livejournal.com/639570.html
[19] Admiral Alexander Ivanovich Rusin was the military attaché in Tokyo before
the war. He had warned Russian war minister Kuropatkin about the possible day of
Japanese attack on Port Arthur and about unavailability of Russian response
without serious preparation, but military circles in Petersburg completely ignored
his analysis. Rusin was also a member of the Russian delegation in Portsmouth,
and again nobody wanted to listen to his opinion that Russia could win the war in
less than a month. So when Luzhin decided to jump from the window (Rusin’s
mother’s last name was Oknova – ‘okno’ in Russian means window), his relatives
tried to ask for help from a trustful and experienced Alexander Ivanovich, but
unfortunately he was not there in the time of Port Arthur’s (Lushin’s) fall.
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[20] Sir Ian Hamilton. A Staff Officer’s Scrap-book During the Russo-Japanese
War. 1907, vol. 1, pp. 277-278.
[21] The cover of the first Russian edition of the novel was decorated with the
figure of "The Bronze Horseman" (Tsar Peter the Great).
[22] In Russian: The Case of the surrender of the fortress of Port Arthur…, p.422
[23]The Problem of the Pacific in the Twentieeth Century, by General N.Golovin
in collaboration with Admiral A.D.Bubnov. Translated by C.Nabokoff. 1922, p. 5
12