left by the back door—on this last day, after a long exciting struggle during which the old man revealed a capacity for breathing hard through the nose—Luzhin perceived something, something was set free within him, something cleared up, and the mental myopia that had been painfully beclouding his chess vision disappeared. “Well, well, it’s a draw” said the old man. He moved his Queen back and forth a few times the way you move the lever of a broken machine and repeated: “A draw. Perpetual check.” Luzhin also tried the lever to see if it would work, wiggled it, wiggled it, and then sat still, staring stiffly at the board. “You’ll go far,” said the old man. “You’ll go far if you continue on the same lines. Tremendous progress! Never saw anything like it before.… Yes, you’ll go very, very far.…”
It was this old man who explained to Luzhin the simple method of notation in chess, and Luzhin, replaying the games given in the magazine, soon discovered in himself a quality he had once envied when his father used to tell somebody at table that he personally was unable to understand how his father-in-law could read a score for hours and hear in his mind all the movements of the music as he ran his eye over the notes, now smiling, now frowning, and sometimes turning back like a reader checking a detail ina novel—a name, the time of the year. “It must be a great pleasure,” his father had said, “to assimilate music in its natural state.” It was a similar pleasure that Luzhin himself now began to experience as he skimmed fluently over the letters and numbers representing moves. At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments—he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel. These possible continuations that explained the essence of blunder or foresight Luzhin gradually ceased to reconstruct actually on the board and contented himself with perceiving their melody mentally through the sequence of symbols and signs. Similarly he was able to “read” a game already perused once without using the board at all; and this was all the more pleasant in that he did not have to fiddle about with chessmen while constantly listening for someone coming; the door, it is true, was locked, and he would open it unwillingly, after the brass handle had been jiggled many times—and Luzhin senior, coming to see what his son was doing in that damp uninhabited room, would find his son restless and sullen with red ears; on the desk lay the bound volumes of the magazine and Luzhin senior would be seized by the suspicion that his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women. “Why do you lockyourself up?” he would ask (and little Luzhin would draw his head into his shoulders and with hideous clarity imagine his father looking under the sofa and finding the chess set). “The air in here’s really icy. And what’s so interesting about these old magazines? Let’s go and see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees.”
Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes. Green needles adhered to their delicately brick-colored caps and sometimes a blade of grass would leave on one of them a long narrow trace. Their undersides might be holey, and occasionally a yellow slug would be sitting there—and Luzhin senior would use his pocketknife to clean moss and soil from the thick speckled-gray root of each mushroom before placing it in the basket. His son followed behind him at a few paces’ distance, with his hands behind his back like a little old man, and not
It was this old man who explained to Luzhin the simple method of notation in chess, and Luzhin, replaying the games given in the magazine, soon discovered in himself a quality he had once envied when his father used to tell somebody at table that he personally was unable to understand how his father-in-law could read a score for hours and hear in his mind all the movements of the music as he ran his eye over the notes, now smiling, now frowning, and sometimes turning back like a reader checking a detail ina novel—a name, the time of the year. “It must be a great pleasure,” his father had said, “to assimilate music in its natural state.” It was a similar pleasure that Luzhin himself now began to experience as he skimmed fluently over the letters and numbers representing moves. At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments—he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel. These possible continuations that explained the essence of blunder or foresight Luzhin gradually ceased to reconstruct actually on the board and contented himself with perceiving their melody mentally through the sequence of symbols and signs. Similarly he was able to “read” a game already perused once without using the board at all; and this was all the more pleasant in that he did not have to fiddle about with chessmen while constantly listening for someone coming; the door, it is true, was locked, and he would open it unwillingly, after the brass handle had been jiggled many times—and Luzhin senior, coming to see what his son was doing in that damp uninhabited room, would find his son restless and sullen with red ears; on the desk lay the bound volumes of the magazine and Luzhin senior would be seized by the suspicion that his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women. “Why do you lockyourself up?” he would ask (and little Luzhin would draw his head into his shoulders and with hideous clarity imagine his father looking under the sofa and finding the chess set). “The air in here’s really icy. And what’s so interesting about these old magazines? Let’s go and see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees.”
Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes. Green needles adhered to their delicately brick-colored caps and sometimes a blade of grass would leave on one of them a long narrow trace. Their undersides might be holey, and occasionally a yellow slug would be sitting there—and Luzhin senior would use his pocketknife to clean moss and soil from the thick speckled-gray root of each mushroom before placing it in the basket. His son followed behind him at a few paces’ distance, with his hands behind his back like a little old man, and not