DE VERDEDIGING / NABOKOV

"The plot concerns the title character, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin. As a boy, he is considered unattractive, withdrawn, and an object of ridicule by his classmates. One day, when a guest comes to his father's party, he is asked whether he knows how to play chess. Embarrassed, he says no, but this encounter serves as his motivation to pick up chess. He skips school and visits his aunt's house to learn the basics. He quickly becomes a great player, enrolling in local competitions and rising in rank as a chess player. His talent is prodigious and he attains the level of a Grandmaster in less than ten years. As his obsession with chess grows, he becomes socially detached and physically unhealthy. At a resort, he meets a young girl (his "Queen" as it were), never named in the novel, whose interest he captures. They become romantically involved, and Luzhin eventually proposes to her.

Things turn for the worst when he is pitted against Turati, a grandmaster from Italy, in a competition to determine who would face the current world champion. Before and during the game, Luzhin has a mental breakdown, which climaxes when his carefully planned defense against Turati fails in the first moves, and the resulting game fails to produce a winner. When the game is suspended Luzhin wanders into the city in a state of complete detachment from reality.

He is returned home and brought to a rest home, where he eventually recovers. His doctor manages to convince him that chess was the reason for his downfall, and Luzhin, aided by his fiancée, decides to abandon all thoughts of chess.

Slowly however, chess begins to find its way back into his thoughts (aided by incidental occurrences, such as an old pocket chessboard found in a pocket, or an impossible chess game in a movie). Luzhin begins to see his life in vague chess terms, seeing continuing repetitions of 'moves' leading to his slide back in to a life of chess obsession. He desperately tries to find the move that will allow him to avert this scenario, but feels it growing closer and closer.

Eventually, after an encounter with his old chess mentor, Valentinov, Luzhin realizes that he must "abandon the game," as he puts it to his wife (who is desperately trying to communicate with him). He locks himself in the bathroom (his wife and several dinner guests banging on the door). He climbs out a window, letting himself fall to his death. The last line of the (translated) novel reads: "The door was burst in. 'Aleksandr Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich,' roared several voices. But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich." "(bron: wikipedia)

HEER, VROUW, BOER : CITAAT

"Niet dat [Martha] een speciale geremdheid ervoer. Ze was geen Emma, en geen Anna. In de loop van haar echtelijke leven was ze gewend geraakt haar gunsten met zo'n vaardigheid, met zo"n berekening, met zo'n geoefende lichamelijke doelmatigheid aan haar rijke beschermer te schenken, dat zij die zich rijp achtte voor overspel allang gereed was voor hoererij." (p. 241)

"Zij had behoefte aan een honkvaste man. Een ingetogenen ernstige man. Ze had behoefte aan een dode man." (p. 332)

HEER, VROUW, BOER / NABOKOV

Franz (Bubendorf), a young man from a small town, is sent away from home to work in the Berlin department store of his well-to-do uncle (actually, his mother's cousin), Dreyer. On the train ride to Berlin Franz is seated in the same compartment with (Kurt) Dreyer and Dreyer's wife, Martha, neither of whom Franz has met. Franz is immediately enchanted by Martha's beauty, and, shortly after Franz begins work at the store, the two strike up a secret love affair.

As the novel continues Martha's distaste for her husband grows more pronounced, and with it her adoration for Franz. Franz, meanwhile, begins to lose any will of his own, and becomes a numb extension of his lover. Dreyer, meanwhile, continues to lavish blind adulation on his wife, and is only hurt, not suspicious, when she returns his love with resentment.

As her relationship with Franz deepens, Martha begins to hatch schemes for Dreyer's demise. Franz himself has begun to lose interest in Martha, but he goes along with her plotting. As part of Martha's plans, the three vacation together at the Seaview Hotel at Gravitz, a resort at the Baltic. She plans to take Dreyer, who cannot swim, out in a rowing boat so he can be drowned. On the boat, however, the plot is suspended by Martha when she learns from Dreyer that he is about to close a very profitable business deal. Martha then gets pneumonia from the rain and the cold on the boat. To Dreyer's great sorrow she passes away; he never learned about the betrayal and the danger he was in. Franz relieved by her death is heard laughing "in a frenzy of young mirth".

OVERZICHT JAAR 2 (APRIL 2008 - MAART 2009)

Fictie:

- Hadji Murat / Leo Tolstoy
- A Hero of Our Time / Mikhail Lermontov
- Memoirs of the House of the Dead / Dostoevsky
- Resurrection / Tolstoy
- Kindertijd / Tolstoj
- De Lady Macbeth uit het District Mtensk / Ljeskow
- Jeugdjaren / Tolstoj
- Het Kapittel / Ljeskow
- Aantekeningen van een jonge arts / Bulgakov
- De man die zijn wereld opdronk / Ivanov
- De Witte Garde / Bulgakov
- Leven en Lot / Grossman

Non-Fictie:

- Alexander II : De Laatste Grote Tsaar / Radzinsky

Film:

- Nieuw Babylon / Kozintsev & Trauberg
- Als de kraanvogels overvliegen / Kalatozov
- Alexander Nevskis / Eisenstein

Kleine berekening:

- Non-fictie: 423 p.
- Fictie: 3.410 p.
- Dit maakt samen: 3.833 p.
- Film: 295 min.

En...

- Beste non-fictie: Alexander II (bij gebrek aan concurrentie...)
- Beste fictie: moeilijk, maar het werd: Memoirs of the House of the Dead
- Beste film: Nieuw Babylon

LEVEN EN LOT : CITAAT

" Maar in de kou van het bos was de lente duidelijker voelbaar dan op de zonnige vloakte. In deze stilte van het bos lag een groter verdriet dan in de stilte van de herfst. In de sprakeloze stomheid was een schreeuw om de doden te horen en de razende vreugde van het leven."
Het was nog donker en koud, maar binnenkort zouden de deuren en de luiken opengegooid worden, en het lege huis zou tot leven komen, zich vullen met gelach en gehuil van kinderen, de haastige stappen van de geliefde vrouw en de zelfverzekerde passen van de heer des huizes.
Daar stonden ze, met hun boodschappenmandjes voor het brood, en zwegen."

EINDE