The Luzhin Defense
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Narrated by:
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Mel Foster
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By:
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Vladimir Nabokov
About this listen
Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness.
As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent’s unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault.
One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940, he moved to the United States and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961, he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
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The Master and Margarita is one of the most famous and best-selling Russian novels of the 20th century, despite its surreal environment of talking cats, Satan and mysterious happenings. Naxos AudioBooks presents this careful abridgement of a new translation in an imaginative reading by the charismatic Julian Rhind-Tutt. With War and Peace and Crime and Punishment among the Naxos AudioBooks best-sellers, this too promises to be a front title.
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Very vivid and amazing writing style
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Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, (1860-1904), was born in Russia at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His name has become synonymous with a certain literary style much admired and widely copied since his death. Typically, a Chekhov story is a "mood", a state of mind, usually with regard to relations between one person and another. Under the influence of the constant, infinitesimal, and unforeseen pinpricks of life, there occurs a gradual transformation of that state of mind.
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A Box of Chocolates
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In this sweeping tale of love, loyalty, and betrayal - between a husband and a wife, between sisters - fact and fiction seamlessly blend together, creating a compelling portrait of an unforgettable woman and her struggle to reconcile her love for her sister with her obsessive desire for her sister's husband, the mythic father of psychoanalysis.
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What a Super Ego
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The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.
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Long live Maigret
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England, 1959: Laurel Nicolson is 16 years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.
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Kate Morton (and Caroline Lee) does it again!
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We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. At its center is a girl whose passionate love is her fortress against the cruelty and oppression of a totalitarian state. Rand said of this book: "It is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write."
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Emotionally intense, historically authentic
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Vienna, 1902: A beautiful medium has been found shot dead, and Dr Max Liebermann, a young disciple of Sigmund Freud, is called upon to help his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt investigate her death. The room containing the body has been locked from the inside, and a cryptic note suggests a malevolent supernatural power is at work. Using the new science of psychoanalysis, Liebermann probes the minds of the suspects in an attempt to unravel this bewildering crime.
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Ho-hum Victorian mystery
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Grand Central
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On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
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The Ballad of the Sad Café
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A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose cafe serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind", McCullers' first published story, written when she was only 17, about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.
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Literate short stories
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What listeners say about The Luzhin Defense
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- Adeel
- 08-28-21
The narrator hates Luzhin
The narrator's exaggerated, mocking voice for the main character makes this a painful listening experience.
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- Darwin8u
- 11-13-12
Life and chess are such lonely battles
"Let's start if you're willing."
G.K. Chesterton once famously quipped in his book 'Orthodoxy' that "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom."
Vladimir Nabokov’s th!rd novel about a lonely chess grandmaster reminds me of Franz Kafka and a little bit of Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'. While this isn't my favorite Nabokov (it isn't 'Pale Fire' or 'Lolita'), it is the sweetest. Most of Nabokov's characters are cold, irrational and distant. Luzhin is sad, über-rational and beautiful in his madness.
History is full of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and chess Grand Masters whose search for logical conclusions, 'transfinite' sets, perfect stability, etc, drives them nuts. Men who hold an infinite series of answers and thus an infinite possibility for despair. Like Kafka once said, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
To men like Luzhin, life and chess are such lonely battles.
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