ABSTRACT
M u s i c played an important role in the Nabokov home. Al though the writer was often to proclaim his own relative indifference to music, he was far from musically illiterate. Nabokov ' s parents and brother Sergei were music lovers in a city famed for its musical culture. M u c h music was also heard in the home. Fyodor Chal iapin , the famed Wagnerian soprano Felia Litvinne, and Serge Koussevitzky all gave recitals in the family music room. 1 Nabokov remarks that his father "must have heard every first-rate European opera singer between 1880 and 1922, . . . and remembered every note of his favorite operas." 2 On the eve of his father's assassination, the last conversation between father and son touched upon the opera Boris Godunov (Boyd 192). Nabokov ' s sense of musical structure is most evident in The Defense, where elaborate parallels are drawn between chess and musical architectonics.
