The Luzhin Defense Read Online Free PDF

lingered long in those heavens where earthly lines go out of their mind.
    For a while he found an illusory relief in jigsaw puzzles. At first they were simple childish ones, consisting of large pieces cut out with rounded teeth at the edges, like petitbeurre cookies, which interlocked so tenaciously that it was possible to lift whole sections of the puzzle without breaking them. But that year there came from England the fad of jigsaw puzzles invented for adults—“poozels” as they called them at the best toyshop in Petersburg—which were cut out with extraordinary ingenuity: pieces of all shapes, from a simple disk (part of a future blue sky) to the most intricate forms, rich in corners, capes, isthmuses, cunning projections, which did not allow you to tell where they were supposed to fit—whether they were to fill up the piebald hide of a cow, already almost completed, or whether this dark border on a green background was the shadow of the crook of a shepherd whose ear and part of whose head were plainly visible on a more outspoken piece. And when a cow’s haunch gradually appeared on the left, and on the right, against some foliage, a hand with a shepherd’s pipe, and when the empty space above became built up with heavenly blue, and the blue disk fittedsmoothly into the sky, Luzhin felt wonderfully stirred by the precise combinations of these varicolored pieces that formed at the last moment an intelligible picture. Some of these brain-twisters were very expensive and consisted of several thousand pieces; they were brought by his young aunt, a gay, tender, red-haired aunt—and he would spend hours bent over a card table in the drawing room, measuring with his eyes each projection before trying if it would fit into this or that gap and attempting to determine by scarcely perceptible signs the essence of the picture in advance. From the next room, full of the noise of guests, his aunt would plead: “For goodness’ sake, don’t lose any of the pieces!” Sometimes his father would come in, look at the puzzle and stretch out a hand tableward, saying: “Look, this undoubtedly goes in here,” and then Luzhin without looking round would mutter: “Rubbish, rubbish, don’t interfere,” and his father would cautiously apply his lips to the tuffed top of his son’s head and depart—past the gilded chairs, past the vast mirror, past the reproduction of Phryne Taking Her Bath, past the piano—a large silent piano shod with thick glass and caparisoned with a brocaded cloth.

3
    Only in April, during the Easter holidays, did that inevitable day come for Luzhin when the whole world suddenly went dark, as if someone had thrown a switch, and in the darkness only one thing remained brilliantly lit, a newborn wonder, a dazzling islet on which his whole life was destined to be concentrated. The happiness onto which he fastened came to stay; that April day froze forever, while somewhere else the movement of seasons, the city spring, the country summer, continued in a different plane—dim currents which barely affected him.
    It began innocently. On the anniversary of his father-in-law’s death, Luzhin senior organized a musical evening in his apartment. He himself had little understanding of music; he nourished a secret, shameful passion for
La Traviata
and at concerts listened to the piano only at the beginning, after which he contented himself with watching the pianist’s hands reflected in the black varnish. But willy-nilly he had to organize that musical evening at which works of his late father-in-law would be played: as it was the newspapers had been silent for too long—the oblivion was complete, leaden, hopeless—and his wife kept repeatingwith a tremulous smile that it was all intrigue, intrigue, intrigue, that even during his lifetime others had envied her father’s genius and that now they wanted to suppress his posthumous fame. Wearing a black, open-necked dress and a superb diamond dog collar, with a