商品の説明

Nabokov's third novel, The 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 As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates.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 the world of 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 unpredictabke lines of assault.

商品の詳細

• Amazon.co.jp ランキング: #430910 / 本
• 発売日: 1999-12
• 版型: 単行本
• 278 ページ

内容（「BOOK」データベースより）
『ロリータ』のナボコフ、幻の初期代表作待望の本邦初訳。チェス小説の最高傑作。

内容（「MARC」データベースより）
ナボコフが、「ロシア語で書いた全作品のうちで、最も温かさに満ちあふれた作品」と語る、幻の初期代表作を本邦初訳。チェスプロブレム作家でもあった著者が、チェスを題材に人々の人間模様を描く。

About the Author
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

カスタマーレビュー

チェスの棋譜さながらの面白さ！
芸術的なその戦法によって、幼少時から数々の大会で勝利と名声を重ねてきたチェスの天才、ルージン。ある重要な試合半ばにして極度の緊張から神経を病むが、彼の純粋さに惹かれた女性と出会い結婚、妻の献身的な愛情によりチェスから離れ静かな人生を歩み始める。しかしチェスという魔物は決してルージンを放ってはおかなかった。そしてある日ついに―。

「ロリータ」の作者として知られる亡命作家ナボコフが、母国語であるロシア語で書いた初期の傑作。チェスの棋譜さながらの周到な伏線、重厚で高度な芸術性、ユーモア、悲劇性などの多彩な魅力に加え、ロシア文学ならではの幻想的な陰影が独特の深い読後感を残す。日本ナボコフ協会会員であり、国際チェス連盟による日本人初の「プロブレム（チェスの詰め将棋のようなもの）解答国際マスター」の称号を持つという翻訳者、若島正氏の誠実で読みやすい翻訳と解説も素晴らしい。

チェスを扱った傑作小説
映画化もされた「ロリータ｣で有名な著者ですがチェスもかなり好きだったようですね。外国小説独特の風景描写で物語は始まり、少し難解な感じがしますが、読み進むにつれて音楽、絵画などの芸術と同じようにチェスを捉えた表現に惹き込まれます。多数のチェス本の翻訳を手がけておられる若島 正さんの文章はほんとに見事だと思います。 チェスを題材にしておりますが棋譜は全くと言っていいほどでてこないので普通の小説としても読めますし、かといってチェスファンにとって物足りないということもなく、興味深く読みました。 河出書房新社さん、チェスに関するよい本をこれからも出して下さい！^^