Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  8

  MARK DVORETSKY

  A couple of days later, Volodja pointed out Mark Dvoretsky when he entered the dining hall of the House of Trade Unions. Dvoretsky is the most distinguished chess trainer in the Soviet Union if not the world, with two of his students, Artur Yusupov and Sergei Dolmatov, currently ranked among the strongest international grandmasters. While he stood on line waiting patiently for a cup of coffee, a man shyly approached him with his teenage son and the three shook hands. For the boy, meeting the famous trainer was clearly a special moment. Other men recognized him too, and some made their way across the large room to ask his opinion about the position in the ongoing Karpov-Kasparov game. Clearly this portly thirty-seven-year-old chess teacher was something of a celebrity.

  Dvoretsky spoke little English, so I asked Volodja to introduce us and translate our conversation. Dvoretsky was congenial and particularly pleased to meet Pandolfini, whom he knew of from reading Chess Life. Indeed, most Russian chess teachers and players knew the American chess magazine and were delighted whenever we gave them a copy. Published by the U.S. Chess Federation, Chess Life is filled with profiles of grandmasters, pages of ratings in near-microscopic print, puzzles and the dense analysis of grandmaster games. The magazine is a treasured illicit commodity to Russian players, particularly to Jews who can’t get visas to travel and who crave knowledge of the Western chess world; dog-eared copies are secretly shuttled from player to player. Soviet officials consider Chess Life anti-Soviet political propaganda because included in the dense thicket of annotated games are the victories and defeats of such Russian defectors as Victor Korchnoi, Lev Alburt and Igor Ivanov—traitors and nonpersons from the point of view of the Soviet establishment. Even when these players compete against Russians in international competitions, their results are usually not included in accounts published in Soviet newspapers and magazines, as if the native grandmasters had played ghosts.

  Bruce and I had hoped to meet Dvoretsky to learn about the Russian system of chess education, which develops so many strong young players. We wanted to ask him to teach my son for a few sessions while we observed; since Josh was one of the strongest for his age in the United States, we assumed that Dvoretsky would be at least mildly curious.

  We were surprised and disappointed when he turned us down. “No, it would be a waste of time,” Dvoretsky said firmly. “I do not begin working with a student until he is, say, 2100 or preferably 2200 according to your rating system, a weak master. All my techniques are designed for master level and beyond.”

  This was unexpected. In the United States, once players approach master-level strength there is no systematic education available. Some funding is provided for grandmasters to work with talented young masters,* but there is no one like Dvoretsky with a comprehensive system for teaching at the highest level. Instead, there is an attitude among players that once you achieve the rating of chess master you can develop further only on your own. Joel Benjamin, for example, one of our top young players, stopped studying regularly with a teacher when he was a teenager, at an age and playing strength that would have made him a desirable prospect for Mark Dvoretsky. Benjamin explained, “Who could be my teacher? What could he know that I don’t already know? It’s useless studying with someone you can beat.”

  Mark Dvoretsky’s best students are stronger chess players than he is, but they still develop rapidly under his tutelage. Joel Benjamin’s rational point of view is symptomatic of the basic differences between the ways our two societies perceive chess. In the United States players consider it a game with rules to be learned, openings to be memorized, techniques and tactics to be mastered. They are preoccupied with ratings, which reflect their playing strength relative to others. If a player’s rating goes up a couple of dozen points, he glows as if he had won the lottery.

  American players generally don’t speak of chess as art, and metaphysical questions about the game make them uneasy. There are few examples of the kind of creative criticism that is common in the fields of literature, art and music in the West. Most chess writing is dry technical analysis relevant only to serious students of the game.

  Perhaps this is an aspect of a defensive mentality. Examining the aesthetics of chess would somehow be peculiar and inappropriate in an environment where with a few exceptions its best practitioners live tragic, deprived lives. American society tends to regard serious players as an eccentric group whose intelligence is useless. They are treated as if they are naughty curiosities, children who never grew up, outrageously self-involved people who spend their days hedonistically playing a game instead of learning a useful trade, building a career, getting on with life. Unlike poets or painters, American chess players can’t defend themselves with the claim that they are pursuing an art; our culture simply doesn’t consider chess art. “The only people who care about chess and chess players here are other players,” said Russian defector Igor Ivanov, the leading money winner in North America in 1984. (He cleared less than ten thousand dollars after expenses for his year of labor.)

  Professional players in the United States are bitter about their poverty and lack of recognition, but they don’t do much to improve their image. Failure seems to beget more failure. Even at the best tournaments the players are a ragtag group, sweaty, gloomy, badly dressed, gulping down fast food, defeated in some fundamental way. Many of them tell you that they ought to be doing something different with their lives, which is reasonable, considering that even the most brilliant are impoverished. Others explain that they are playing chess full time for the money, which is unconvincing since they could make more doing almost anything else. Generally speaking, professional players are reluctant to own up to their passion for the game, almost as if it were akin to admitting a preference for deviant sex. But despite social and economic pressures, these most rational of men keep at it year after year, forswearing more profitable and reasonable life choices.

  In the Soviet Union, the devotion of professional players to chess is economically feasible; chess players of international strength are supported by the state, and an instructor’s income from teaching is greater than that of a Soviet doctor or engineer. Enthusiasm for the game is also a reflection of social values. Thousands of Russians play in parks throughout the city, and even nonplayers follow chess in the papers. The top players are national heroes and are as revered as, say, Michael Jackson, Don Mattingly and Clint Eastwood in our country.

  Writing on Soviet chess in 1949, Mikhail Botvinnik, then the world champion, explained the success and the psychological advantages of the Soviet player: “What is there in the Soviet school which distinguishes it fundamentally from the foreign school? Most important of all [is] the social position of chess. . . . We Soviet masters . . . know that this is a socially useful cultural activity and that we are bringing benefit to the Soviet state.”* In short, chess is a barometer of Russian cultural supremacy. When Fischer defeated Spassky in 1972, wresting away the world championship that Soviets had come to believe was their permanent treasure, there was a national fear that something was rotten in the land.

  Chess is part of the Soviet national consciousness, like baseball or football in the United States. Because of its metaphorical resonance and the logical and mathematical purity of the game, it represents vastly different things to different people. Over the years there has been spirited debate in the U.S.S.R. over whether chess is an art, a sport or a science. Players such as Boris Spassky and David Bronstein often describe chess lyrically in terms of intuition, fantasy and romanticism. In Bronstein’s book Chess in the Eighties,* the game becomes a metaphor for life, an occasion for social criticism in the manner of Christopher Lasch or Susan Son-tag. Russians write short stories and poetry about chess. At the same time, the Soviet school of chess has been distinguished from other styles of play by its rigorous use of scientific methods of experimentation and systematic analysis. For Mikhail Botvinnik, now retired, and for others interested in developing artificial intelligence, chess provides
the raw material for serious scientific investigation into the nature of human intelligence.

  Since the twenties, chess has also been regarded as a training ground for Soviet political life. In his book Soviet Chess, D. J. Richards writes: “. . . the qualities of the ideal chess-player coincided with those of the ideal Communist: both needed to be resourceful and inventive, to have a feeling for both strategy and tactics and to possess an iron determination to overcome all obstacles on the path to ultimate victory.”†

  Soviet politicians attempt to make political hay with chess. They barter for the favor of top Soviet players, and in turn the players milk the politicians for political and material advantages. As mentioned earlier, Karpov and Kasparov both have enormous political power, and it is well known that Karpov is a millionaire.

  While it is common for Russian players to be ordered to lose games for the good of the state, many citizens consider chess a part of man’s moral education, a training ground for the principles of honor and truth and for the harmonious development of personality. Dvoretsky, whose pupils have had a success unparalleled by the students of any teacher in the West, sounds more like a psychoanalyst or an Eastern mystic than a chess teacher. “When I take on a student I work on his personality as a whole, not just chess knowledge,” he said. “I’m not interested in teaching people how to memorize. Rather, I develop the psychological capacity for making decisions in different situations. For me, analyzing the drawbacks of a chess player is much the same as analyzing the drawbacks of his personality. I suppose my process is analogous to your psychoanalysis, and correcting weaknesses in the personality will ultimately correct fundamental weaknesses in play.

  “I will give you an example. One of my students liked to draw his games. This was an aspect of his indecisiveness as a person. He was too dependent on me in chess, and on other people for other aspects of his life. Drawing his chess games was only the symptom of a larger timidity. So at one point in our work I refused to allow him to draw; he could only win or lose. To be free of his draws was a tremendous revelation for him, and he began to play with great creativity and fighting spirit. The next step was for me to withdraw from him; I would give him no advice at all. It was upsetting to him, but in this way I was still teaching him. Soon he began to win major tournaments and became a strong grandmaster.

  “I collect examples from different tournaments in order to develop skills. These exercises are very complicated and are designed to help a pupil not just in chess, but to solve central psychological problems and to teach thinking. Yusupov profited greatly from working with my problems. For a time he was fading in the most important tournaments, and when we analyzed his games I realized that he was very keen on his own conceptions but was not being attentive enough to the possibilities of his opponent’s position. I wanted Yusupov to enter into his opponent’s mind. When you have a successful attack going you may not notice a surprising defense. It is natural not to see what a resourceful player in a losing position may do. Therefore I gave Yusupov exercises to develop his sense of intuition.

  “I take talented expert-level players and bring them to grandmaster strength in two years,” Dvoretsky went on matter-of-factly. If so, this is extraordinary, for in the United States, young players frequently linger at the expert level for several years before gradually becoming weak masters. The difference in skill between a chess expert and a grandmaster is enormous—say, the difference between a lower-minor-league baseball player and a major-league all-star.

  Dvoretsky began to demonstrate a complicated rook-pawn endgame problem whose unexpected solution became clear only after one of several possible variations was traced ten moves deep. “Even in obvious situations, things aren’t really obvious,” he began while quickly moving the pieces. “It is easy to find moves when you are attacking, but at the same time there are subtleties you are not likely to notice that in the end will cost you the game. My exercises are filled with latent threats.”

  “His problems were extremely sophisticated,” Pandolfini recalled later. “I had to work very hard to follow his ideas, though he assumed that I was getting them without any effort. I’ve analyzed with Fischer, and it was the same kind of experience. Bobby would move the pieces in a blur, assuming that I understood but not really caring if I did or didn’t. If I’d walked out of the room, Dvoretsky wouldn’t have noticed; he was in a world of his own.”

  While Dvoretsky explained his puzzles, there were many distractions. Josh and Anton were again playing chess nearby, sitting on the floor of the dining room, their mouths bulging with huge gobs of bubble gum. Occasionally there were bursts of applause and we would glance at a bank of television monitors to check the progress of Karpov and Kasparov’s game.

  A burly, box-jawed man stood beside me listening to every word Dvoretsky said, his stony face only inches from my little tape recorder. I assumed this newcomer was a chess fan straining to follow Dvoretsky’s complicated analysis, so I smiled at him and said hello. The man didn’t answer, and his expression never changed. Soon half a dozen other men were standing around us rigidly eaves-dropping as if we were filming an E. F. Hutton commercial. Dvoretsky continued his lecture, but Volodja, beside himself with rage, lost the thread of his translation. “He’s a KGB agent,” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard fifty feet away. “Why do they do this to us? We’re talking about chess, not war!”

  AFTER THREE FRUSTRATING days of arguing and pleading at the Central Chess Club and a call to the American embassy we were given press credentials, but time and again Soviet officials nervously explained that it would be impossible for us to visit chess schools. By an unfortunate coincidence, they were all closed for repairs. It was as if we were asking to see missile factories. And whenever I brought up Boris Gulko, my conversations with Russian grandmasters and chess officials alike came to an icy end. Gulko, I discovered, was one of the most famous political dissidents in the Soviet Union, and it seemed unlikely that I would ever find him.

  * The American Chess Foundation, a nonprofit organization, funds master-level chess tournaments, school chess programs across the country and private lessons for exceptional young American chess players who demonstrate potential in tournament play. A.C.F. has funded Joshua’s lessons with Bruce Pandolfini since my son was seven.

  * M. M. Botvinnik, Izbrannye partii (Leningrad, 1949), pp. 11–12.

  * D. Bronstein and G. Smolyan, Chess in the Eighties, trans. Kenneth P. Neat (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1965).

  † D. J. Richards, Soviet Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 39.

  9

  VOLODJA

  Most mornings in Moscow we went with Volodja Pimonov to museums and churches or took Josh to play chess in one of the many parks or chess clubs. Usually we drove in Volodja’s rattling Zaporoszhets, which he had recently hand-painted muddy blue. Each time we set off he said the same thing: “I hope the car won’t fall apart before we get there.” To buy it, he had earned extra money teaching Russian to foreigners a few years earlier, but such good fortune was unlikely to come his way again, he felt, and this would probably be the only car he would ever own. He was proud of the car, but also embarrassed, and fretted constantly about it: “Sounds like something is wrong with my transmission.” Or “Why is it stalling? It must be my carburetor.” Or “There is something wrong with the lock on the driver’s side. Do you think you could help me fix it? Finding parts is impossible.” For him the car was a connection to the Western world of drive-in banks and movies, superhighways and garages with automatic doors, which he read about in magazines or heard described by his wife during their phone conversations—a world he was likely never to see. Whenever the car rattled or coughed, he looked stricken.

  Volodja’s curiosity about the West was like an unwelcome lust. He was filled with questions, but the answers agitated or silenced him. During one discussion about journalism I told him that after finishing an article I never showed it to the person I had written about for approval. He was baffled by this. �
��To write an article about Karpov and not show it to him first would be slanderous here. A writer would lose his job.”

  “But if you showed it to him and he demanded a change, it might compromise the honesty of the article,” I said. It was a new idea to Volodja, and he didn’t know what to make of it.

  I had the uneasy feeling that Volodja was making large decisions based upon what he learned from us. Often he looked at my face for signs of hidden motivations, and sometimes when he smiled sadly I knew that I had failed some test. “The problem with you people,” he said (meaning Americans), “is that you want to be number one in everything. You will be the end of us with this competition. Better houses and better cars, more missiles, more ships.” But though he was often critical of the West for its politics or materialism, he craved its hidden possibilities. It outraged him that he was not allowed to look and judge for himself. “You say that you write on a personal computer?” he asked, and in the rearview mirror I could see that he was wide-eyed. “I’ve never seen one.”

  ‘The way is broken,” Volodja said one morning as Josh and I sat in the back seat jammed against the jack and spare tire, our feet in two inches of muddy water. He meant that this stretch of road on the way to Sokolniki Park was potholed, and that we should brace ourselves. He was checking the rearview mirror frequently to see if we were being followed. It was illegal for him to be driving foreigners, and on this dreary morning the nameless consequences of being caught made us all feel uneasy.

  In Sokolniki Park a chess club nestled within a little forest of birch trees. It was raining steadily, yet two old men in tattered coats sat beneath the trees at a rickety wooden chess table staring at a position. Inside a damp, narrow room we found seventy or eighty Russians playing chess at long tables, while more men lined up behind the players waiting for a turn. They were laborers, dressed in heavy overcoats and caps, with ruddy, fleshy faces and thick, weathered hands. They moved the worn wooden pieces as if they were laying bricks and mortar.