by Daša Drndic
This is how it was:
Izmailov wins the First Championship of the Russian Federation in 1928. A year later he checkmates Botvinnik (a fatal mistake). Then, until 1936, he devotes himself to his profession, he researches Siberian forests, makes love and tells his son fairy stories. Izmailov does not have time to wander around competitions, he transfers his attention to reality, to Russian, Siberian reality, and, it could be said, his chess power wanes. But still, life isn’t bad. Despite droughts, there is still food, ever less, but some. Perhaps people eat more buckwheat porridge, piroshki, and blini, but Siberia is known for its beef, so there is milk, there is butter, there is cheese. People make pelmeni, mmmm, as Croatian television’s Ana would say, the one who, as well as cooking, dances with the stars. So, our Izmailov, not exactly a muscle man, fair-skinned and light-eyed as he is, believes in his today and his Soviet tomorrow. Then in 1936 there comes an invitation to participate in an important chess tournament in Leningrad and he says, I’m going, never dreaming that he is going to his death.
Badly prepared as he was, Izmailov finishes sixth of the fifteen on the list. That is not good. A red light goes on at the NKVD. The local secret police (NKVD Tomsk) is in a state of readiness. Izmailov is under strict observation about which he has no clue, because, although he may be troubled by some doubts, like many others he sings:
Thank you, Comrade Stalin, I warm myself at your fire.
May you live for a thousand years, tovarishch Stalin,
And however hard the days may be for me,
Statistics will show that we have more iron, more steel per head of the population.
On September 10, 1936, Izmailov phones his wife from his office in Tomsk to say that he will be late for lunch as the local NKVD people have called him for a short conversation. That conversation consists of police questions: Why did Izmailov play so badly in Leningrad? Why did he travel such a long distance in order to finish only sixth? From that conversation the police conclude: comrade Izmailov, member of a Trotskyist terrorist organization, travels to Leningrad to develop a plan about the liquidation of the chief of the Leningrad Party branch, comrade Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov. The trial lasts twenty minutes. Comrade Petr Nikolaevich Izmailov, Trotskyist fascist terrorist, is declared guilty. Petr Nikolaevich Izmailov is shot near today’s Museum of Torture. The museum may include a list of the murdered. If I ever go to Tomsk, I’ll check.
The wife of Petr Nikolaievich Izmailov, as member of a traitor’s family, is shunted off by the authorities to Kolma, to a gulag, from which, eight years later, she emerges, well, a bit broken. Today, in the rooms of the Chess Memorial Center in Tomsk, for the sake of relaxation, the eighty-year-old Nikolai, son of Petr Nikolaevich Izmailov, plays chess with youngsters. If he is still alive.
Измайлов Петр Николаевич
Родился в г. 1906, Казань; русский;
образование высшее; б / п; геологоразведочный
трест, инженер-геофизик.
Проживал: Томск.
Арестован 10 сентября 1936 г.
Приговорен: 28 апреля 1937 г., обв.: троцк.
фаш-терр.
Приговор: расстрел.
Расстрелян 28 апреля 1937 г.
Реабилитирован в сентябре 1956 г.
The problem composer Petr Moussoury (1911–37) was shot by the NKVD, together with his mother, for being a member of a terrorist organization. He was then burned in the first Russian crematorium at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.
Муссури Петр Степанович
Родился в г. 1911, Баку; грек; подданство:
подданный Греции; образование высшее;
внештатный сотрудник редакции
шахматно-шашечной газеты “64”.
Проживал: Москва, ул.3-я Миусская, д.4а, кв.5.
Арестован 20 марта 1937 г.
Приговорен: ВКВС СССР г. 1 августа 1937, обв.:
связи с участниками к.-р. террористической
организации и участии в контрабанде и
спекуляции .
Расстрелян 1 августа 1937 г. Место
захоронения — Москва,
Донское кладбище.
Реабилитирован 24 декабря 1957 г. ВКВС СССР
Источник: Москва, расстрельные списки
— Донской крематорий
Here is yet another who created those shameless chess compositions, fatal for the Soviet system: Mikhail Nikolaevich Platov (1883–1938). In 1910, together with his brother, Misha Platov publishes a prize-winning and perhaps the best-known problem composition, which is printed and reprinted numerous times, and of which even the passionate chess player Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, says with rapture, Oh what a wonderful creation! But then some zealous apparatchik, some crazed, bigoted policeman, some frightened snoop, discovers Platov’s compositions in German magazines and — the hunt begins. Platov is arrested in October 1937, there is no public indictment, no trial, just a free ticket for a ten-year stay in a gulag, in which a few months later Platov gives up his sinful chess player’s soul.
Then, here is the young — oh, so many young — the young Nikolai Konstantinovich Salmin (1907–38?), a withdrawn and quiet worker, one of the best Leningrad chess players of his time, who suddenly, just like that, vanishes without trace. Later, when Nikolai Salmin was rehabilitated in the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s, the traces suddenly surface.
It would be possible to say a lot and at length about the sly fox and good chess player Krylenko, the highly placed prosecutor in the political show trials of Stalin’s reign of terror, who (not unusually) himself ended up a victim, a whole book could be written with just a list of the people whose torture and execution he oversaw, but no. Few people today are interested, because nowadays such hideous things no longer occur. On the whole. Then Stalin dies, and Krylenko is resurrected. In the 1960s Krylenko’s great contribution to the development of Soviet chess is acknowledged, he is proclaimed its father, and in 1989 he receives a commemorative coin with his image. And then the Soviet Union disappears.
That’s how one should look at history. In an easygoing manner. Briefly. By leaps and bounds. After Stalin’s death many chess players of the USSR — and hundreds of thousands of people who were not chess players — were rehabilitated. They receive deeds in which it is presumably written that they are rehabilitated, that they were not enemies, that their country now loves them, and some also receive badges. Except that not one of them is still alive.
While Ada and I play chess, images flare in front of my eyes, arrows flash, they lodge in the frontal part of my brain.
Why are you blinking so much? asks Ada.
It’s the glaucoma, I say.
There are no symptoms with glaucoma.
Then it’s the dark, I say.
I can’t tell her: that darkness sticks to my eyelids, life sticks to my eyelids. What’s left of it. It would sound inappropriately poetic, Ada isn’t the poetic type, she’s not an openly poetic type, although there are strings trembling in her that she plucks in her deserted life.
You’re blinking because of Leila. Leila is an optical illusion. Listen, says Ada.
Semyon Semyonovich, with his glasses on, looks at a pine tree and he sees: in the pine tree sits a peasant showing him his fist.
Semyon Semyonovich, with his glasses off, looks at the pine
tree and sees no one sitting in the pine tree.
Semyon Semyonovich, with his glasses on, looks at the pine tree and again sees that in the pine tree sits a peasant showing him his fist.
Semyon Semyonovich, with his glasses off, again sees no one sitting in the pine tree.
Semyon Semyonovich, with his glasses on again, looks at the pine tree and again sees that in the pine tree sits a peasant showing him his fist.
Semyon Semyonovich doesn’t wish to believe in this phenomenon and considers this phenomenon an optical illusion.
Ada is selling Kharms to me. Kharms has nothing to do with my case. Has anyone publicly proclaimed me mentally problematic? Has anyone proclaimed me a traitor? Kharms dies, history maintains, in February 1942, of starvation, in his cell in the Psychiatric Department of Leningrad No. 1 Prison, where he was placed by the NKVD.
This is how hunger begins:
In the morning you wake lively.
Then weakness,
Then boredom,
Then comes the loss
of quick reason’s strength —
Then comes calm,
And then horror.
I am not Kharms.
Хармс Даниил Иванович
(Варианты фамилии: Ювачев) Родился в г. 1905,
г.Санкт-Петербург; образование неоконченное
высшее; б / п; Поэт.
Один из основателей литературной группы
ОБЭРИУ.
Проживал. г. Ленинград.
Арестован 23 августа 1941 г.
Приговорен: ВТ войск НКВД ЛВО 7 декабря
1941 г.
Приговор: Направлен на принудительное
лечение в психиатрическую больницу
закрытого типа.
Умер в тюремной больнице 02/02/1942.
Реабилитирован 25 июля 1960 г.
Leila is not an optical illusion. Leila was a ballerina, now she is old and fat, she has swollen knees and thin hair, probably from having it tugged back into those silly little buns. Like me, Leila sways when she walks. I hadn’t seen Leila for twenty years, then I saw her briefly, and then after another twenty years she surfaced again, and it would have been better if she hadn’t. When I met Leila, Elvira did not yet exist in my life, I was in the first league, handsome, tall, strong and intelligent. Leila is Latvian, born in Riga. When I met Leila all I knew about Latvia was that it was a part of the Soviet bloc, I presumed that it was all one and the same history. I presumed, logically, that Latvians lived in a poverty entirely similar to Soviet poverty, in shared apartments in which people wait in a queue for the toilet or a shower, and outside in long queues for everything, for cucumbers and bread, even the whole night, drinking tea from a thermos flask, and then after hours and hours have passed, they stand in front of a counter with shoes on it, they grab what they can, often two shoes of different sizes, and then walk with a limp. I hadn’t heard of a single Latvian writer, let alone read one. All right, I did know that Latvia has and has had excellent chess players, that I knew, of course. I knew of the great combinator, the offensive and imaginative Tal, although for a long time I had experienced him as Russian because the Russians experienced him as Russian, as their acquisition, while he was in fact called Mihails Tāls, and not Михаил Нехемьевич Таль (Mikhail Nekhemevich Tal), because the Latvians don’t use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Russians do. In his youth, Tal beat Botvinnik, who was arrogant and rude to him thereafter. Then, Tal died in Moscow, not in Riga, and relatively young, at fifty-five, because his kidneys failed, in fact everything about him failed, apart from his head.
Today I know of some well-known Latvians, but the majority of them were only born in Latvia and, as soon as the opportunity arose, they scarpered to the West, so that the world does not experience them as Latvians at all, although that is changing now that Latvia has detached itself from Russia, because Latvia is working on its image, on its positive image, hurriedly recalling its great citizens, promoting them tutta forza, all those who left long ago and never returned, because they are dead. On that other image, on its dark side, Latvia is not exactly working, like Croatia. It’s a con.
I know that Baryshnikov was born in Riga, I know that he was of short stature, that he emigrated from the Soviet Union first to Canada, then to the United States, that he married Jessica Lange and that he has been living for a long time with a ballerina, who is no longer a ballerina, just as Leila is not.
I discovered that the American Mark Rothko was in fact Markuss Rotkovičs, or today in Russian Мaркус Яковлевич Роткович, born in Latvia and that he went with his family to America before the Revolution, but he’s still American, people like adopting other people’s countries, other people’s wealth, so why not also other people themselves. So Latvians say today, Listen, Markuss Rotkovičs, alias Mark Rothko, is in fact ours, he’s not yours, but in fact ours. Okay, with the growth of anti-Semitism before the beginning of the Second World War, Markuss Rotkovičs was overcome by a mild panic, although he was relatively well protected in America, so he changed his name to Mark Rothko, to a supposedly unrecognizable Jewish surname, so that he is no longer Markuss Rotkovičs, as the Latvians like to call him. When Rothko came to Europe in 1950, for the first time since he left Latvia, it somehow didn’t occur to him to pay a visit to his beloved Latvia, but spent five months enjoying his freedom, visiting museums in England, France, and Italy. Then Rothko became increasingly famous, then ill, then impotent, and in 1970 he cut his veins and died (at sixty-six), and then, in 2003, a fairly ugly, enormous statue called A Dedication to Mark Rothko was erected in his native town, Daugavpils, and in 2013 the town opened a gallery, in fact a small museum, called the Mark Rothko Museum, because the economic crisis was unsettling Latvia as well, so hopes were placed in the flowering of international cultural tourism, with the international Rothko at its heart. In the little museum, alongside local painters, there is a modest collection of Rothko’s works, donated to Daugavpils by Rothko’s heirs. So, as one of the best-known abstract artists of the twentieth century, after immigrating to America in 1913 with his family as a ten-year-old because of Latvia’s rising anti-Semitism, Markuss Rotkovičs finally returned home a hundred years later.
Now I know that the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin was also born in Riga. It turns out that in the world there are quite a few celebrated people from Latvia. Such a small country, remarkable.
There’s a Latvian called Ernests Foldāts who is among the best-known world specialists in orchids. That is a good life, constantly in the embrace of the queen of flowers, far from people, far from politics, outside history, enchanted, intoxicated by fragrant velvety petals of pastel shades. Do orchids have a scent? Ernests Foldāts studied mostly Venezuelan orchids, probably because he immigrated to Venezuela, and from Venezuela he could not have studied Latvian orchids, if there are such things, he could only study the Venezuelan ones. Ernests Foldāts died in 2003. Today the Latvians are proud of him.
And Walter Zapp, he died in Switzerland, also in 2003, aged ninety-seven.
Walter Zapp created a mini-camera of high resolution, a so-called spy camera that fits in the pocket.
And Eisenstein was born in Riga, but Latvia was then part of the Russian Empire, so that is probably why Eisenstein is considered a Russian, although today the Latvians vigorously oppose such appropriation of their great men.
Rosa von Praunheim was born in Riga at a terrible time, 1942. I know a lot more than many about him, but maybe that’s for later.
I met Leila in Rovinj, in the 1970s. I don’t want to write about our love affair, because it was just an
ordinary love affair, with quite a lot of wine and sex, and when one talks or writes about ordinary love affairs, which are most often boring, standard and in terms of content intolerably repetitive love affairs, which do not entail any drama, no one slits their veins, no one jumps into a bath with a hair dryer switched on, no one shouts, no one fights or swallows tranquilizers, no one even weeps, when one talks or writes about such love affairs, which are refined and restrained love affairs, there is nothing to say, although there is a lot to say, but such content is less and less popular in literature, for such content is more probing than writing about those herzig, heartrending love tragedies, bound in cheap paper, sold at kiosks and read by women under dryers at the hairdresser. The majority of today’s readers (particularly, unfortunately, women, because women read more than men) like for the most part a superficial (dramatic) blurring of reality, but with time such reality in love is invariably transformed into a heap of debris and trash, into a slimy succession of senseless little movements, rhythmic twitches like barely audible breathing, not to say impulsive copulation. One can talk or write about other people’s love affairs, many people adore filling up their spent, moldy spaces, it’s possible to talk and write about one’s own love affairs, which then serve others, and mostly those who write about love affairs, either as solace or entertainment, or again, as a way of bringing a little (neon) light into the darkness that drums behind our eye sockets, like Knausgaard, who has already written six autobiographical volumes, which people devour as though they had been tottering for months in a scorching desert, and in which everything happens in real time, slowly and pallidly, because real time is no kind of time as it doesn’t exist. I’ve read some extracts from those idiocies of Knausgaard’s, absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is riddled with holes, so the cultivation of voyeuristic instincts fills up that inner void. It would have been better for Knausgaard to keep a diary, though the diaries of writers, even great writers, are fairly narcissistic and in fact tedious material (not long ago a well-known writer asked me, almost conspiratorially, Do you keep a diary? He, along with others I know, is waiting for the Nobel Prize, which, of course, he will not get, but who knows. Writers write mostly about themselves and their creations, so that history (literary, although they also count on general, world, all-encompassing history), does not forget them, so that the keepers of civilization should have something to refer to when they are no more. Pure, omnipotent delirium, grandomania par excellence.