54
PART I SAN REV I EW
with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the
next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come,
his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on
the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old
Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic
structure of society, so the mystagogues of
emigre
letters deplored
his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything
about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially
that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American
shocks so dangerously today, when
in
the presence of Soviet military
men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser
pockets. Conversely, Sirin's admirers made much, perhaps too much ,
of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that
sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy
straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff
of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angles of his
clear, but weirdly misleading, sentences and by the fact that the real
life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has
compared to "windows giving upon a contiguous world . . . a rolling
corollary, the shadow of a train of thought." Across the dark sky
of exile Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature,
like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much behind him
other than a vague sense of uneasiness. His best works are those in
which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their
souls. His first two novels are to my taste mediocre; among the other
six or seven the most haunting are "Invitation to a Beheading,"
which deals with the incarceration of a rebel in a picture-postcard
fortress by the buffoons and bullies of a Communazist state; and
"Luzhin's Defense," which is about a champion chess player who
goes mad when chess combinations pervade the actual pattern of his
existence.
III
Speaking of chess reminds me that in the course of my
twenty years of exile I devoted a prodigious amount of time to the
composing of chess problems. A certain position is elaborated on the
board, and the problem to be solved is how to mate Black in a given
