title: Skazki Druzhnogo Lesa (Russian Edition) by Alexei Lukshin
author: Alexei Luckshin
description: Alexei Lukshin was born in 1971 in the city of Gorky. He has two higher educations (economic, literary). Fairy tales for children is the carried-out dream in which the author realized his treasured wish to create kind and fine stories for little readers, listeners and their parents.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  **Vladimir Nabokov**
  
  
  **The Defence**
  
  
  **translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with** **the author**
  
  
  _**to Véra**_
  
  
  **Foreword**
  
  
  The Russian title of this novel is _Zashchita Luzhina,_ which means 'the
  Luzhin defense' and refers to a chess defense supposedly invented by my
  creature, Grandmaster Luzhin: the name rhymes with 'illusion' if pronounced
  thickly enough to deepen the 'u' into 'oo'. I began writing it in the spring
  of 1929, at Le Boulou — a small spa in the Pyrenees Orientales 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.
  
  
  _Zashchita Luzhina_ under my penname, 'V. Sirin,' ran in the émigré Russian
  quarterly _Sovremennye Zapiski_ (Paris) and immediately afterwards was brought
  out in b