Jokes about Gennadi Sosonko as a sort of chronicler for the grim reaper have been going around for at couple of decades now. If Sosonko writes about you, there's a kind of good news, bad news to it: the good news is that if he does, you're somebody in the chess world; the bad news is that if he does, you're probably dead. (That may or may not be bad news for you, but it's at least sad for your loved ones.)
Sam Shankland may be the moderately grim reaper. If you lose to him in the last round of an event (or at least your last round), the good news is that you're clearly a really strong player. The bad news is that it might be your last serious game: he sent Judit Polgar into retirement in the 2014 Chess Olympiad (I can't believe it has been four and a half years! I initially wrote "2016", but then checked to make sure), and now he has sent Vladimir Kramnik out of professional chess as well. It's possible that there's no causal relationship between their losses to Shankland and their retirement, but you can't be too careful: make sure your favorite players don't face him in the last round of a major tournament.
Genna Sosonko, Smyslov on the Couch (Elk & Ruby, 2018). 199 pp. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.
For almost as long as there have been people, there have been dead people. Some of those people have been chess players, and if they were prominent chess players living in the time of the Soviet Union, there's a good chance Genna Sosonko has something to say about them. In 2011 Vasily Smyslov, the World Chess Champion from 1957 to 1958, passed away, and that meant that his memorialization by Sosonko was just a matter of time. That time is here.
Actually, it was back in 2016, in Russian, and now the translation (which is also an expansion of the original), called Smyslov on the Couch, is available to us in English. The title suggests something Freudian, as if Sosonko is going to psychoanalyze Smyslov, but if so the book doesn't live up to this portent. It seems instead to connote that what we'll see is a relaxed Smyslov in the context of a long friendship with the author. Indeed, one of the three photos on the cover shows author and subject sitting on a couch in a relaxed, happy conversation.
The book is itself a pleasant read, because Sosonko clearly liked and respected Smyslov. This is not at all like his rather poisonous memoir of David Bronstein, which left me (and others) dismayed by Bronstein's pervasive bitterness and Sosonko's unfortunate desire to share his need for catharsis with the rest of the chess world. This book won't leave you with those feelings at all.
That's not to say that this is a hagiography. He pokes a bit of fun at Smyslov in the beginning for his superstitiousness, and there are other places where Smyslov comes in for mild critique or is shown with a few warts. But it's only very mild: it's clear that he has a great deal of love and respect for the former world champion, and he is gentle with him.
The book divides into three sections: "The Real Smyslov", "Match Fixing in Zurich and the Soviet Chess School", and "The Final Years". For those of you who are unfamilar with Sosonko and his biographical style, he is a 75-year-old Dutch GM who emigrated from the USSR back in 1972. He didn't become a grandmaster until after he emigrated - few Soviet players had the chance to fight for norms - but he was respected enough to work as a second for players like Mikhail Tal and Viktor Korchnoi. For the past two decades he has written dozens of articles and several books memorializing (primarily, maybe exclusively) players he knew from the Soviet Union. These are not biographies per se - there's usually very little about the person's childhood or chess career. They are pen portraits, offering a picture of what the person was like, the environment they had to cope with, how he himself interacted with them, and depending on the person profiled some critical moment or moments in their life would come under the microscope.
And that's what you get here. The first part of the book gives the reader a sense of what he's like, much more than it gives details about his chess career or his hobby and semi-career as a singer. The second part of the book is a reflection on Bronstein's charge that both he and Paul Keres were pressured to achieve certain results during the 1953 Candidates to make sure that American Samuel Reshevsky wouldn't finish ahead of the Soviets and qualify for a World Championship match with Mikhail Botvinnik. Finally, the last section is largely a series of excerpts from their phone conversations, relaying Smyslov's comments on varied, mostly mundane matters. (Some of part three reads a bit off-puttingly, as Sosonko's part of the conversation is typically omitted. So it reads as if Smyslov is just randomly remarking on this and that, as if complaining to no one in particular and without any prompting. This probably isn't the case - it's quite possible that Sosonko would ask questions during their conversation to which Smyslov gave relevant replies, but the reader can't know this.)
Anyway, Smyslov is probably the least well-known of the Soviet world champions, both in terms of his chess and his personality. You won't learn much about his chess from the book (only one game is given - and that's one game more than you'll find in most of Sosonko's memorializations - and it's a game Smyslov played when he was 14), but you will spend a few pleasant hours with one of the nicer, more humane figures of the Soviet era. Warmly recommended for those who are interested in the history of the game.
Genna Sosonko, Evil-Doer: Half a Century with Viktor Korchnoi. (Elk and Ruby 2018) 314 pp.
Dutch grandmaster Genna Sosonko lived the first part of his life in what was the Soviet Union, and over the past two decades or so has written remembrances of many of the greats and near-greats from the USSR. Many were published as articles for New in Chess Magazine and subsequently compiled into books; those typically featured only a chapter or two on any given player. Lately he has published entire books on single players. We recently reviewed his book on David Bronstein, and now he has written on Viktor Korchnoi.
In general, I've been a fan of Sosonko's reminiscences. The Bronstein book was an exception, as its subject came across so poorly that the book seemed mostly an opportunity for Sosonko to unload his own frustrations with Bronstein. Maybe Bronstein deserved it in some sense, but it didn't do the chess community any favors to see a beloved figure portrayed as a tiny-souled man.
Korchnoi fares much better under Sosonko's pen. It would be hard for him not to, as with Korchnoi what we saw was what we got. The immediate impression anyone would have of him was as a fighter in love with the game of chess, and that's what we see in the book. Sosonko has plenty to say about Korchnoi's chess career, at least up to his last world championship match with Anatoly Karpov in 1981, but this is not a typical chess biography. (For those unfamiliar with Sosonko's biographical books, he doesn't present any games or even positions. The best sources for Korchnoi's chess are his own books, along with Garry Kasparov's "My Great Predecessor" volume on Korchnoi and Karpov.) What we see are Korchnoi's battles: as a youngster, against the Soviet state from within and without, against Boris Spassky, Karpov, old age and so on.
If Korchnoi were needlessly antagonistic this might make for an unpleasant read, but he had real foes to battle, and he was courageous. Interesting too: for all his focus on and love for chess, he wasn't a caricature or a nerd; he was a human being. Flawed, but alive.
Who is the book for? Any chess player whose interest in chess literature extends beyond the purely pragmatic (but not little kids, not yet). It's a history lesson, it's a biography, and simply an interesting story that can be appreciated by readers of almost all ages and backgrounds. Highly recommended.
A P.S. about the title: Sosonko isn't called Korchnoi an "evil-doer"; that epithet was applied to Korchnoi by the Soviet state after his defection.
Genna Sosonko, The Rise and Fall of David Bronstein. (Elk & Ruby Publishing, 2017.) 271 pp.
Memento mori, the medievals said - remember you must die. Going back further, Socrates said that life is a preparation for death. This may seem a glum take on life, but we will all be dead a lot longer than we'll be alive. If the end of this life is the end of us, the value of this life diminishes somewhat, but even then it matters: what of our progeny, our friends, and those we influence directly or indirectly? Even if our story comes to an end (which I don't believe), we are not islands unto ourselves. We must live, and as some do a much better job of living than others, we must learn how to live well.
Perhaps the best way to learn this art is by example: see those who flourish and love, and are loved and capable of receiving that love. See what they do and what they believe, or what beliefs underlie their practice, and emulate them in a way that is relevant to your personality and station in life. Talk to them and learn from them, and if it's possible, learn from their mentors.
There is another way. It's not as good, but it too has value: learn from those who don't know how to live. What made them the bad examples they are? What is the source of their troubles? Was it something they did, or their environment, or some combination of it? As I sometimes tell my chess students, life's too short to learn only from your own mistakes; learn from others' mistakes as well - or only from their mistakes, if possible! It's a sort of Screwtape Letters approach to life, or if you like something more recent and comical, there's something to be said for Opposite-George Costanza:
As C.S. Lewis points out when discussing his The Screwtape Letters, and is at least alluded to in the Seinfeld clip, it's not always exactly clear how to implement the "opposite" of bad advice and instincts, but for the most part we have a pretty good idea of how it will work. If we see someone living a life of bitterness and regret, of narcissism and constant complaint, it's pretty obvious that this is not a desirable life. The person living it is miserable, and makes others miserable until they peel away. We may not know how best to fight those tendencies in ourselves, but seeing them displayed in others helps us to see that we've got a challenge on our hands, and that fixing or at least mitigating those problems is critically important.
What, you may wonder, does this have to do with a chess book? Well, not too much with a normal chess book - though such a book might be the antidote to the "how-not-to" that is sometimes on display at the local club. But this isn't a conventional chess book. No games are given, and there are no positions except those semi-visible in the photos. No moves are given either, except for a few that are alluded to - there are no diagrams. The book is instead a sort of biography of the late great chess grandmaster David Bronstein (1924-2006). Or rather, a memoir of their interactions, interspersed with Genna Sosonko's reflections on Bronstein and his life.
Sosonko is himself a grandmaster (b. 1943), and like Bronstein lived in the Soviet Union, though unlike Bronstein he defected in 1972 to the Netherlands, where he lives to this day. Sosonko knew many, maybe all, of the post-war greats of Soviet chess, many of whom he befriended and some of whom - like Mikhail Tal - he even worked with, pre-defection. He has authored several very appealing books commemorating those players, though there's a touch of ghoulishness to it, as many of these pen portraits were first published in New in Chess Magazine shortly after the player's death.
(This was once spoofed in the satirical chess magazine Kingpin, and on p. 266 of the book reviewed here there's a very funny passage near the end: "And of course, Davy [Bronstein] complained to everybody about this Sosonko dude, who was just waiting pen in hand for him to kick the bucket so that he could publish his memoirs about the near world champion. The interesting thing, though, is that all of Davy's complaints, although frequently unfair and exaggerated, and sometimes even absurd, had a grain of truth in them" (p. 266, emphasis in the original).)
Back to the book. As noted, it's not a traditional, conventional biography. Different events and eras of Bronstein's life are described, but the focus of the book is on the big, gaping wound in Bronstein's soul arising from his drawn world championship match with Mikhail Botvinnik in 1951. Leading by a game with two games to go, Bronstein failed to hold a drawn (but not trivially drawn) ending in game 23 in Botvinnik's last white game, and after a draw in game 24 Botvinnik kept his title, while Bronstein never again got that close to the champion's crown.
Reading this book - and for that matter, other books by Bronstein - one learns that Bronstein had an unending stream of reasons and excuses for failing to win the match (and for not holding the draw in game 23), many of them wildly implausible and sometimes contradictory. And although this was the most significant event of his life, Bronstein's ability to grasp the truth about himself was often tenuous. This is part of the human condition, and some of us have a harder time with this than others (and at different times and in different situations); for Bronstein, this seems to have an especially acute shortcoming.
At any rate, this wound, or whatever it was in his soul that made this one failure so searing, was something that poisoned him. Even though he lived for another 55 years, the ghost of game 23, his antipathy towards Botvinnik, and perhaps the shame he felt or projected onto others for not winning the title haunted him to his death. Sosonko makes this point constantly throughout the book, and it's likely that he did so in part because Bronstein himself went on and on about it to him for decades.
It is evident that Sosonko also feels admiration for Bronstein and tried to be a friend to him. He attempted at times to help Bronstein see that some of what he claimed was nonsense, but it simply didn't work, and he stopped trying. To the extent that Sosonko's representation of Bronstein and his neuroses was accurate, it must have been exasperating and exhausting to be his friend.
Since much of the book shares with us, the lucky readers, the sense of that exasperation as Sosonko recounts over and over and over and over and over again Bronstein's complaints (about game 23, the match in general, about Botvinnik, about young players, about Mikhail Tal's being celebrated even though Bronstein was playing the same kind of chess before Tal did, about ratings, about the competitive element in chess outweighing the artistic, about not getting a pension from FIDE, about this and that and the other thing, etc., and always returning to the same topics), we might wonder what exactly is the point of the book. To make us suffer as Sosonko did, at least to a very small degree? To undermine the light-hearted persona Bronstein presents in some of his works (at least those not ghostwritten by his mentor and patron, Boris Vainshtein)? As a debriefing session or therapy for Sosonko?
It's not clear. Because Sosonko is such a good writer, the book isn't as painful as it could have been coming from someone else's pen (or keyboard). But it's still a fair question to ask why we should read it, because for all the fine writing, and for the attempts to understand Bronstein and emphasize that he was a brilliant chess player with a sharp, creative mind, it's still the sad story of a person whose life was lost in bitterness and regret. So if you do choose to pick up this book, dear reader, look at the life of David Bronstein with compassion and with an eye to avoiding his mistakes - including the meta-mistake of not trying to overcome his mistakes. Very few of us will have to live under a regime like that of the Soviet Union, thank God, and few of us will experience the competitive pain of coming so close to become the world's #1 in anything and coming up just short. But we all have our wounds and our shortcomings. By reflecting on a life of great talent that was not well lived, we can learn lessons that help us to avoid the pitfalls that unfortunately ensnared Bronstein.
Thursday, January 31, 2019 at 2:14PM