Brief book recommendation here (allegedly). Only on chapter II but I am well-read enough to spot a read worth its price.
Yes it’s rather outdated. Yes descriptive notation is used. Yes the author ran a column in The New Statesmen for decades. And yes when I created a thread about him, noted authors were generally complimentary towards him.
But as you may know. Not all books on chess are written well and as is true in all fields some are better than others and some are much better than others. The authors style is indeed impressive. Here he makes a rather basic point but expresses it rather eloquently:
‘It is nice enough to enjoy other people’s brilliances, but nicer still to produce one’s own. To derive some aesthetic pleasure from the flights of fancy conjured up on the sixty-four squares is delightful enough when the conjurer is someone else, but the pleasure can be much enhanced by the thrill of creation and the pride of achievement.’
In the following passage the author Heinrich Fraenkel gives you an idea of his playing ability and character :
‘Regarding the topic of blunders the topic is handled quite delicately and written for a broad audience:
‘What about our own? Most of us, surely, have no shortage of them and some (some?) of us may have more than they care to remember. They are wrong for there is nothing like of the past to serve as a useful lesson for the future (ed: most, if not all SGMs will cite that as an integral part of the leasing process. A lesson to never blunder again. That could hardly be expected (please take note this was written before faster time controls were introduced). More likely, it will be a lesson to accept our every future blunder with ever more equanimity.
The only sad point I feel worth drawing attention to is on page 53 where he commits the cardinal sin in the chess literature genre, that being defining chess players as only that. He portrays Botvinnik as the world champion only, rather than a human being and a Soviet citizen. ‘Botvinnik has the rare distinction of having gained and lost and regained such paradise ‘the glory of supreme achievement’ as he put it. Although undeniably true, the tragedy is when you bypass the normative aspects of what something is, you invariably say very little about it. Botvinnik took time out to do a Ph.D, he became an engineer and was well promoted. He was a father too! It was a little saddening to find another characterisation where only their chess was of importance, but then it is replete within chess literature as a genre and has always been. It’s a little saddening when the author clearly has strong writing skills that they don’t write as broadly as they could…but the good news is a more wholesome account of Symslov appears in the following chapter, which we are entitled to dub a reprieve.
August 15th update
So I read the book. The latter sections contain content I found astonishing. I don’t ever recall seeing someone who is not a native speaker of English write so well with it, I really don’t. Great writer, of that there is no doubt. His stature in his day I am less sure of. His account of Soviet Chess I shall reproduce on this site at a later date.
Well worth a read if you can lay your hands on it.
Mark. J. McCready
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