 Brilliant's audio presents the unabridged recording of The Lusian Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, performed by Melfoster. Tuvera. Forward. The Russian title of this novel is Zashista Lusina, which means The Lusian Defense, and refers to a chest defense supposedly invented by my creature Grandmaster Lusian. The name rhymes with illusion, if pronounced thickly enough to deepen the U into U. I began writing it in the spring of 1929 at Libalu, a small spa in the Pirini Oriental, where I was hunting butterflies, and finished it the same year in Berlin. I remember with special limpidity a sloping slab of rock in the Ulex and Ilex clad hills, where the main thematic idea of the book first came to me. Some curious additional information might be given if I took myself more seriously. Zashista Lusina, under my pen name V. Siren, ran in the emigre Russian Quarterly Savraminia Zapisky, Paris, and immediately afterwards was brought out in book form by the emigre publishing house Slova, Berlin, 1930. That paper-bound edition, 234 pages, 21 by 14 centimeters, jacket a solid dull black with gilt lettering, is now rare and may grow even rarer. Poor Lusian has had to wait 35 years for an English language edition. True, there was a promising flurry in the late 30s when an American publisher showed interest in it, but he turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Lusian a demented violinist. Re-reading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Andersen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kizoritsky, who is doomed to accept it over and over again through an infinity of textbooks, with a question mark for monument. My story was difficult to compose, but I greatly enjoyed taking advantage of this or that image and scene to introduce a fatal pattern into Lusian's life and to endow the description of a garden, a journey, a sequence of humdrum events with the semblance of a game of skill and especially in the final chapters with that of a regular chess... Sample complete. Ready to continue?