Some years ago I worked with two chess 'agencies', one American and the other Russian. I was business manager also writing a column "Alekhine's Parrot' at the Chessville site, as well as writing articles and interviewing + making contributions to Russian
Chess published from St. Petersburg.

Chessville had 12,000 on-line readers when I began, which became 75,000 after two years — a number larger than the USCF had members, and which included about 4,000 Canadian players since they had no paper nor on-line publication at the time.

One Chessville series was 'Lessons Learned' where a player was invited to annotate a loss and another series was '20 Questions'.

I managed via the Russian site to connect with Taimanov for both series, and for Lessons Learned he chose his third match game against Fischer and what followed. In 20 questions I invited Dr Hyde, writing here, to propose half a dozen or 10 questions,
which he did, and rather remarkably this was the first time that Taimanov had been interviewed by 'the West.'

I'll write more anecdotes about his sense of things emerging from the game, about Fischer, but more broadly from the 20 answers he supplied.

Ridiculously the only language we had in common was Latin, though even that served from time to time, nolens volens! Which is subtly different from 'nevertheless' being better rendered as 'notwithstanding'.

Though there was little so subtle, and whereas a friend at Ruschess had a go rendering the work into English, leaving me to chose the right idioms, etc.

[The phrase "The rooks broke through like rutting pigs," is surely only a Russian idiom [?] but I spared Western readers from reading that, losing color, I know, but ... such an expression would never occur in 'Chess Life' since it might shock Chess-Moms]

To end this first segment it is interesting that professional musicians also know of Taimanov, but say, 'O! is he a chess player too?' pace his piano, and all the major double piano, compositions.

Phil Innes

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