Q5 (b)

It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’ – delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray.
Speak, Memory by Nabokov. Copyright © Vladimir Nabokov, 1967 Used by permission of the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited

In what ways does this excerpt reflect the concerns and aesthetic qualities of Nabokov’s nonfiction?
In your response, make close reference to the excerpt and to your prescribed text.