On Wednesday, January 11, 2023 at 8:34:16 AM UTC-5,
vtview...@gmail.com wrote:
At the time of publishing those game notes there was no English language version so I sent a Russian one to Ray Keene in London, but with no immediate effect. I think there is now a 2021 copy published in England [about 30 bucks on Amazon].
In a subsequent interview with myself and Bill Hyde Taimanov explained that on return from Seattle he was caught with a copy of The First Circle, Solzenhytsyn's title, officially banned in Russia, 'though everyone was reading it,' remarked Taimanov.
I was about to correct you, and tell you that the book was "The Fifth Circle" when something prompted me to check. "First" it is. And it makes sense in the context
of the book, which I read when Karpov was a 2200 player. As I recall (and I should really look this up too but am too lazy) the first circle of hell holds the
virtuous pagans while the book is about non-criminal individuals punished for not believing (in communism, in this case). A good title.
The consequence was that he lost all his chess students, and then began to comment upon the plight of bright young chess players from the Russian provinces. Taimanov himself had music to fall back on, but aspiring young players had little else than
chess and wished to relocate themselves to Moscow or Petersburg and try to make a living from the game. But how brittle they were! he remarked.
If they failed on the chess front, they often became psychologically unstable, since this was all they knew, and they had progressed from being the wunderkind of their city, to just another strong master in cities with excesses of IMs and GMs.
In connection with this, I always recall Sosonko's admirable (and admirably titled) collections of mini-biographies of chess players "Russian Silhouettes" and "The Reliable Past".
The case of Vitolins comes to mind, a player who was 2600+ with white but only 2400 with black. When his parents died he said goodbye to some friends and then committed suicide.
A second impact of this encounter, and then the Spassky match, was culturally something similar for the entire nation, both chessically and even politically. Russians simply could not believe that Fischer played without official support — albeit
getting calls from Henry Kissinger about 'national pride' which he ignored. And no help from GM seconds, except one he utilized by making him his coffee maker.
I don't know about Evans, but in private conversation Lombardy gently disputed this. And of course in Curaco Fischer and Benko came to blows over who got to use the services
of Bisguier, their joint second. Flattering for Bisguier. Still, Fischer had no real team, no psychologist. IIRC just Cramer and Lombardy.
The Soviets may have been extrapolating from the case of Reshevsky, who had no GM second (often no second at all) and didn't quite make it to the top. But while their players took
months off for rest, mild exercise, and study before an important event - and Fisher did much the same - Reshevsky was working until a few days before the event. And if his
office was like any I ever worked in then during the weeks before he took his month off work would have been piled on his desk to the point that his R&R would have consisted
of twelve hour days. He barely had time to recover from jet lag before the first round of Zurich 53.
From some offhand comments of his I gather that Fischer had learned lessons from Reshevsky's attempts at the title.
In this as in other things the Soviets underestimated how much Fischer had learned from them.
This all seemed impossible to the group-think Russian chess machine and contradicted their collectivist psychology. Lone-wolf Fischer seemed like a psychological impossibility!
The King's Indian somehow went out of fashion after Fischer, possibly because Viktor Korchnoi made a living by smashing it up ± but here it comes again with Hikaru Nakamura playing it at the highest levels.
Kasparov brought it back for a while in the 90s. I seem to recall a Wijk an Zee event where he went something like 7/8 with it. Of course by then Viktor was 65 and
a mere 2700 player.
William Hyde
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