EEG

by Daša Drndic

  William Henry Russ was only thirty-three when he died in 1866, after a failed/successful suicide attempt. The American William Henry Russ is well known as a fanatical collector of chess problems, which he later published. Nowadays, when people speak about Russ, they rarely mention his chess matches, and often bring up the unrequited love affair that catapulted him into “madness.” Chess players can be fairly egocentric, not to say narcissistic, and their anger soon flares when something, anything, often some stupidity, some nonsense escapes their control. But they can also be timorous, like a closed musical box within which a quiet song echoes — unheard by those outside.

  The story goes that William Henry Russ adopted an eleven-year-old girl in Brooklyn, to whom he proposed seven years later, and when she said No, thank you, he fired four bullets into her head. The young woman survived, which Russ, of course, could not have known because, in a state of mental disintegration, he threw himself into the East River. But it was low tide and Russ did not drown, instead he clambered onto the bank and then shot himself in the head. An ambulance took him to hospital, where he soon died, because, people said, he had lost the will to live.

  The international chess champion Wilhelm (William) Steinitz, famous for his attacking style, born in 1836 in Prague’s Jewish ghetto, died of a heart attack in a mental hospital in Manhattan in 1900, with empty pockets and decaying brain cells — caused, some sources have it, by syphilis. Steinitz too was a mathematician. But as early as 1897, when Lasker checkmated him in Moscow, Steinitz apparently had a nervous breakdown and spent forty days in a Moscow sanatorium, so-called, in which, triumphantly rubbing his hands, he played chess with the inmates. Afterward he spent months in the Psychiatric Department of the Manhattan State Hospital, where he had been put by his wife and where, in 1900, he died, maintaining beforehand I am in electronic communication with God, I give Him the white pieces and surplus pawns, to see who is stronger.

  There were years when chess-playing suicides would serially throw themselves out of windows. Which is surprising, such a lack of existential style and imagination in great international masters, those dogged combinator-combatants. And nowadays the chess players who most like to throw themselves out of windows are from Russia and the Baltic states, perhaps inspired by Nabokov’s novel about Luzhin, because in that novel the grandmaster Luzhin, obsessed with the violins, tympani and drums of his life, steps out of that life, hounded by objects and phenomena that melt into black and white fields, on which figures dance in attack, in constant movement, and throws himself, grotesquely, squeezing his slack and unhealthy fat body through a small window placed high up in a dazzlingly white Berlin bathroom.

  Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain — and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. . . .

  Perhaps Russian and Baltic chess players experience Nabokov (and chess) more intensely and passionately than Americans and others, and that is why they leap to their deaths. To be sure, Nabokov can be suggestive and he was a good chess player. But Nabokov collected butterflies, which he later hung, pinned and arranged mathematically and precisely, on his walls, as though they were voodoo dolls, and perhaps it was thanks to those murdered butterfly ghosts that he survived. Humphrey Bogart did not collect butterflies, but he played chess extremely well, one could say maniacally. Obsessed with the bellicose strategies of silent opponents, he moved chess pieces in breaks between takes, at tournaments, in parks, in cafés, but also by correspondence, so that in 1943 the FBI banned the practice of such entertainment by correspondence, thinking that he was sending secret codes to someone “over there.” Bogart played chess even on his deathbed, as he suffocated from cancer of the esophagus.

  And here, of course, is Prokofiev, close to Capablanca and Botvinnik and his (Prokofiev’s) numerous diaries, in which, in addition to music, he writes passionately about chess.

  That is how I feel at the moment, like a chess player pinned like a butterfly, one of a row arranged in a decorative frame on someone(else)’s wall of reality.

  All right, the American chess player Henry Pillsbury, crazed with syphilis, tried to jump from the fourth floor of a hospital in Philadelphia in 1905, only to die the following year at the age of thirty-two, and he had definitely not read Nabokov.

  Nor had the German chess master Curt von Bardeleben, who threw himself out of a window in 1924, apparently as a result of appalling poverty; he could not have read Nabokov either, since Nabokov did not publish his story about Luzhin in Russian in Berlin until 1930, and in English thirty-four years later, but on the other hand, in all probability it was precisely the life and death of poor Bardeleben that gave Nabokov the story of the fatal obsession with chess that overwhelms his Luzhin to the point of annihilation, just as it psychophysically destroys and disintegrates Stefan Zweig’s Dr. B., who, it seems, (fictionally) remains alive, while in 1942 his creator Stefan Zweig, also a good chess player, killed himself, with his wife Lotte, in his home on Petrópolis in Brazil, and they were found, dead, theatrically holding hands:

  (And) are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance — but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras . . .

  On the other hand, Georgy Ilivitsky had certainly read Nabokov because, in 1989, he threw himself faultlessly out of the window, at the age of sixty-seven. Ilivitsky was parrying Botvinnik, Petrosian and Spassky, following in the footsteps of Geller and Smyslov, and preceding Keres and Taimanov. A powerful player with an even more powerful ego. They’ve forgotten me, said Ilivitsky, so I’ll kill myself the way Luzhin did. Like the unreal, invented Luzhin, the living Ilivitsky couldn’t tell chalk from cheese, reality became imaginary for him, while the imaginary became real. So when it happened to Ilivitsky, as to numerous chess players before and after him, that the imaginary that seemed to him real burst into what was for him shaky, elusive reality, all hell broke loose, barely controllable disorder, worlds split open in whose depths the fires of hell burned. Nothing but checkmate nightmares. Nightmares with no way out.

  Oh God, even to the present day chess players leap to their deaths or slide into insanity, transform themselves into their horses, springers, hussars, into their knights and steeds, into their infirm pawns and swift hunters who broaden the field of battle in a light charge, rushing headlong from the delimited battlefield into the abyss, sinking into nothingness, while above them, above their graves, lively and perfidious queens and lame kings, those majestic figures in our lives, continue their well-trodden path through time. And so, the checkmate of life carries off its victims. The battles replace one another. Now one, now another wild horde, however robust it may seem, fails to defend the palace of its fortified rulers forever, so the captured empires flicker through existence, through endlessness, and fall, one after the other.

  Under a mantle of soundlessness, terrible battles take place, debacles prepared in advance, deceit, substitution and murder above which reigns
paranoia, now gentle and serene, now cruel and penetrating. The great game of chess seizes, captures, drags its players away into the padlocked underground of obsession.

  In 1989, the Armenian Karen Grigorian, born in 1947, jumped from the highest bridge in Yerevan, and ten years later his friend, copyist and blitz-partner, the Latvian Alvis Vītoliņš threw himself from a railway bridge into the icy waters of the Gauja River. The Estonian Lembit Oll (1966–99) jumped from his fifth-floor apartment in Tallinn, evidently depressed because of his recent divorce. Lembit Oll played his last tournament before his death in Nova Gorica, where he drew with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian grandmaster and champion of the match Zdenko Kožul, who was then playing for Croatia.

  There are a lot of them, these chess-playing suicides.

  In 1901, the German Johannes von Minckwitz threw himself under a speeding train, losing both arms, and died soon afterward.

  In August 1909, the chess master from Leipzig Rudolf Swiderski, just thirty-one, took some kind of poison, then shot himself in the head.

  And then, relatively recently, in May 2012, the leading Bengali chess player, Shankar Roy, hanged himself from the ceiling with the help of his wife’s long scarf, stating in a farewell letter that he was going in search of God. He was thirty-six.

  I’m not thinking about Bobby Fischer, I remember him, I remember his victories and his unappealing, mad, but also sorrowful story.

  There have been wealthy chess players, there are more and more of them today, but there were also some who were very poor and who died of disease, cold and hunger, like the Viennese Carl Schlechter (b. 1874), an elegant player, a gentleman of chess as people called him. Not wanting to ask anyone for help, Carl Schlechter closed his eyes forever in a little rented room in Budapest one snowy Thursday in 1918, just before New Year’s Eve.

  An excess of chess can make some people’s hearts burst. Chess can devour a life. Combinations that twine and intertwine seeking a route to an opening. The board closes, the pieces go beserk, the artillery starts scattering shells, chaos ensues on the battlefield, the center cannot hold and — adieu.

  The Englishman Howard Staunton, 1874, in London, heart failure.

  The Hungarian Andors Wachs, in 1931, defeats his opponent, falls onto the board and never raises his head again.

  The German Paul Leonhardt (1877–1934) dies in the middle of a match.

  The American Frank Marshall (1877–1944), heart failure after a chess tournament ends.

  The American George Sturgis (1891–1944) dies in Boston of a heart attack after returning from his honeymoon.

  Efim Bogolyubov, born in 1889 in Kiev, dies in 1952 of heart failure after playing a simultaneous exhibition in Triberg, Germany.

  The Cuban chess champion Juan Quesada dies in 1952 of a heart attack during an international tournament in Havana.

  In 1955, in his fiftieth year, the American Herman Steiner also abruptly goes to meet his maker.

  And E. Forry Laucks (1897–1965), after the sixth round of the US Open in San Juan, Puerto Rico, collaborates to ensure he never has to return home.

  Then the Swedish grandmaster Gideon Ståhlberg (1908–1967) dies of a heart attack while the international chess tournament in Leningrad is still underway.

  Also a grandmaster, the Muscovite Vladimir Simagin dies in 1968 of a heart attack during a tournament in Kislovodsk. He was forty-nine.

  In 1970, Charles Khachiyan, president of the Chess Association of New Jersey, dies in the middle of a game of chess.

  Two years later, on his way to a meeting of FIDE during the Twentieth Chess Olympiad, the businessman and manager Kenneth Harkness (1898–1972) dies on the train to Skopje.

  The Ukrainian Leonid Stein (1934–73), the Soviet grandmaster at the height of his career, dies in the Moscow hotel Rossiya while preparing for the European team championship in Bath, Great Britain.

  The Australian Cecil Purdy (1906–79), heart failure during a match. It is said that, before collapsing, he announced The victory is mine, but the game will go on.

  The grandmaster and president of FIDE for many years, Max Euwe (1901–81), heart failure.

  The Dutchman Euwe, otherwise a mathematician, an amateur heavyweight boxer in his youth, twice chess world champion, plays the championship in 1948 in gloves because, he says, it stimulates his competitive spirit.

  The American Ed Edmondson (1920–82), heart attack while playing chess on a Hawaiian beach.

  The Polish-American grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky, or rather, Szmul Rzeszewski (1911–92), heart failure, respectable age. The wunderkind Rzeszewski/Reshevsky sprang into the world of chess at the age of four. A photograph in which he is playing a simultaneous exhibition in France as an eight-year-old, with a crowd of gray-bearded old men and a voluptuous audience in the background, is disturbing. Something isn’t right about it, I know what it is, but I can’t deal with that now. Manipulation everywhere, always.

  What are you talking about? asks Ada. Then we carry on playing.

  And the Polish-Argentinian chess player Miguel Najdorf (Mojsze Mendel Najdorf, or rather Mieczysław Najdorf), master of the rapid transit game, has reached a respectable old age when he dies of a heart attack in his eighty-seventh year (1997), but his entire family disappeared in German concentration camps.

  In 2000, the Latvian grandmaster Aivars Gipslis collaborates in the course of a tournament and dies of a heart attack or stroke in Germany in his sixty-third year.

  In that same year, at a chess tournament in Finland, the grandmaster Vladimir Bagirov, also a Latvian, born in 1936, dies of a heart attack.

  Latvia has some excellent chess players, before Tal and after Tal, up until today. And such a small country.

  Leila called, says Ada, move your king, check.

  So many chess players die young, of heart problems, of TB, of hunger, of torture and cold in concentration camps and gulags, I say.

  Leila called, says Ada.

  During the Second World War, significant chess events waned. Reality was so noisy (and bloody) that it suppressed the imagination, reality imposed its own game, mercilessly and cruelly; reality outgrew itself, like some kind of giant, arms akimbo, legs apart, threatening the passage to the other side, while the other side was suffocating in darkness, madness, and death. But there are always those forever in the shackles of boyhood who crawl through the blacked-out and obscured imagination, who creep through their lairs without looking for a way out. Sometimes a savior appears, sometimes not. One ought to research the connection between the playing styles of individual chess players and the style of their lives, one ought to research the style of life of individual chess players and their attitude to history, to the present, but I am beset by other thoughts, other presentiments, other memories, which, I now see more and more clearly, lead to an inextricable tangle of senselessness.

  I was disturbed. Leila had called, Leila had called, and instead of immediately continuing toward points on the journey which I had designated as ways out, toward the points of an ending, toward the tiny scars that ought to bear witness to transience, to the close of day, to days which lie down in their little caskets under those faded wounds waving au revoir or adieu, drawing ever closer to them, I see the way those points of an ending, those points of finality and no return change their shape, change their structure, broaden and contract, change now into troughs, now into slots, which become furrows, then hollows, and grottoes, they change into dens, boreholes and lairs in which my years and the years/lives of those close (and not close) to me lie, years which only down there, in clefts, thrash about, flail and writhe like some unfortunate body suffering from an epileptic fit or they wriggle like hungry worms. And so, in the course of the match I play with my sister Ada, and which, increasingly distracted, I on the whole lose, I begin to examine the lives of chess players in troubled times, which, unexpectedly (who would have expected such a trick of the m
ind?), start to bring back images from a distant love affair into which I had entered with a certain skepticism and from which I fled, confused and frozen.

  Keres. Estonian, a mathematician and grandmaster. Paul Keres, born 1916, dies of heart failure in 1975 in Helsinki. During the war he participates in chess tournaments all over the Reich: 1942 in Tallinn, Salzburg and Munich, 1943 in Prague, Poznán, and then again in Salzburg and Munich, and in Kraków and Warsaw, all led and organized by Ehrhardt Post, the leading light in the Great German Chess Society (Großdeutscher Schachbund). When the Red Army liberates Estonia from German occupation, Keres does not manage to bolt, the NKVD prepares his liquidation, but Botvinnik intercedes with Stalin and Keres spends the rest of his life merrily shifting around little black and white figures all over the world. Unlike, for instance, the Latvian chess master Vladimirs Petrovs from Riga, for whom there is no one to intercede and who disappears aged thirty-five in the Kotlas gulag in the Archangel province, where in winter the dead, heaped into enormous boxes, are carried by sledge to distant empty spaces, and in spring, when the snow melts, are thrown into communal graves. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Petrovs, who is then playing in a championship in Moscow, is captured because he allegedly criticized the USSR for the decline in living standards in Latvia, and, in keeping with the ominous Article 58 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR on “counter-revolutionary activity,” sentenced to ten years of “socially useful labor,” which he does not succeed in completing as he dies two years later.