28 July 2021

Recently, the game of chess has become extremely popular not only among professional and amateur players, but also among ordinary people. A 2020 miniseries — ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ — was an unprecedented success for Netflix. Officially the plot is based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name. Nonetheless, there have been numerous speculations that the miniseries might be also an adaptation of two cult novels by Vladimir Nabokov — ‘The Defense’ and ‘Lolita’. Following the burst of the game’s popularity, the public’s attention was once again drawn to a theme in Nabokov’s œuvre that has been commonly overlooked before — chess.

This is despite the fact that Nabokov not only repeatedly drew on chess in his texts, but was also known as a chess composer. A whole 1969 poetry collection Poems and Problems is dedicated to chess. In addition to 53 poetic compositions, it also features 18 chess enigmas by Nabokov.

The exhibition will feature a series of chess problems composed by Vladimir Nabokov, accompanied by their solutions, interesting facts about the life of the writer and quotes from his works, closely intertwined with the chess motif. Additionally, you can read a lecture about chess in Nabokov’s life and work.

Authors of the exhibition: students Mariia Usova and Polina Demenko.

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