Reviews and Comments

Great book. Very interesting look at both life-in-exile for the Russian bourgeoisie post-revolution, at artistic/excellent genius, and at chess. Luzhin was interesting and enjoyable to converse with. Prose vibrant, lyrical, etc, vivid. Now spoilers ahead so:

The book was an interesting interrogation of what we can call infantile genius, or schizoid genius I guess. I'm sure there's a proper term for this, but I don't know it. But Luzhin being pushed around his whole life essentially, being a brilliant chess-player, but also a pawn, was interesting. I think this is something many brilliant sportspeople can likely recognize today, or people who excel in a certain field, and are pushed to pursue it from a young age. You have control only in the game, and so the game consumes even more of your life outside it, which I guess makes it harder to get control again. For Luzhin he of course never fit in originally anyway, and chess becomes an outlet for him for that reason. It consumes his attention, and ends up consuming his life too, leaving him living it basically for chess. This bad? or good?, who's to say, but I think Nabokov's conclusion is that you should stay true to your genius, if you have one. Luzhin does not do well in other fields, something his wifey isn't really willing to accept. She married Luzhin because he's a chess savant, but his ability to deal with other matters is null. To sum up the whole ordeal, chess may very well kill Luzhin, but it's also his raison de vivre. Le epic dilemma!

I read this in Swedish. This is a book by Secretary-General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, who was shot down by far-right paramilitaries fighting for the Belgian-backed Katanga militias during the Congo crisis. He was, and perhaps will always be, the greatest Secretary-General the UN has had. This is because he was a true visionary.

Vägmärken, as Markings is called in Swedish, is a text he was apparently working on during the Congo Crisis. It's made up of aphorisms, and of observations, both from his own life, as well as of the experience of being human. A lot of it is Christian, a lot of it is kind of Nietzschean, in the sense that Hammarskjöld is hammering home the idea that you really have to work for your ideals, and have faith in them, and that through this they'll come to pass. He was a remarkable man, and I didn't read this without knowing something about the man and the circumstances around his death, and I've admired him a long time. Finding this book on a bookshelf in a bookshop, I was ecstatic. Reading it was surreal.

Vägmärken translates as "markings", but directly translated it's actually "Road marks". What Hammarskjöld writes here is less so a roadmap that you can follow to live a good comfortable life, than a roadmap you can follow to live a meaningful one. It's a collection of short, idealistic musings, aphorisms, etc, which centre basically around his own values, and his own beliefs of what he should be striving for, but also for what we, as humanity, should be striving towards.

If this seems overly abstract, or rambly, it's because I'm also having a hard time pinpointing exactly how to describe this text. It's very interesting, and I personally also found it very valuable to read, in that it's given me a good roadmap on acting out my ideals. It's a short read - if you're able to, I can only recommend reading it, though I'm sure you might benefit from knowing a bit about the crisis surrounding his premature death. And I'd recommend reading up on that, even if you don't want to read this book.