Illustration by Joan LeMay
Though the revelation that onetime ATP world No. 8 and major Schopenhauer fan Janko Tipsarevic had a quote from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot tattooed on his bicep once unleashed a firestorm of slightly patronizing excitement among tennis commentators, the marriage between the Great Russian Novel and tennis is a time-honored and complicated relationship, stretching from the 1870s, when Tolstoy wrote about tennis in Anna Karenina, through the 20th century, when Nabokov made the game a central obsession in Lolita.
In his English-language masterpiece, Nabokov—who was a fine player himself, and supported himself as a young writer and recent émigré by teaching tennis in Europe— returns over and over again to the game. Throughout Lolita, there are 36 references to tennis, not counting two additional references to backhand slaps, and some of the novel’s most beautiful scenes involve limpid nymphets variously serving and slashing.