03/09: Chess, the game of love and war
Chess has been the subject of many myths and legends going back centuries, with uncertainty about the game's origins lingering to the present. The principal modern work on the history of chess was written by H.J.R. Murray and published as long ago as 1913. The erstwhile mainstream of scholarship, pointing to an emergence in northwestern India by the early seventh century CE, relies primarily on this source. Some critics of Murray have attributed his out-of-India hypothesis, built on the work of a long line of English and Scottish orientalist scholars, to a need for upholding a cultural prestige position for British colonialism in India. The India-origin idea was also accepted, however, by the Dutch and German historians of the nineteenth century Antonius van der Linde and Tassilo von der Lasa. Many flaws in Murray's giant opus have been noted, but nothing comparable has appeared since, and its successor will have to be the cross-cultural work of many minds from the fields of linguistics, history, and archaeology working on a project for which speculation is abundant and evidence scarce. A group of historians, some of them chess masters, called the Initiativgruppe Koenigstein, based mostly in Germany, has been taking steps on this path since the 1990s.Proto-chess may have issued from several different streams coming from various points along the Silk Road trade route; the broader Persian empire (including Sogdiana and Bactria), China, and the Kushan empire have all been nominated as alternative sites, or contributory sources, for the birth of the game. Likely ancestors include a group of racing games not unlike pachisi played on the 8x8 ashtapada board, which was then adapted for the new king-hunting game. Other racing games of antiquity such as the Egyptian senet and the so-called Ur game of Mesopotamia also have at least some claim on the ancestry of chess. Another source may have been the Greek war game of poleis or petteia as a product of Hellenistic culture in southwest Asia undergoing mutations in the wake of Alexander's oriental empire. A game recognizable as chess appeared sometime in the period between the end of the Roman empire and the advent of Islam. This early chess was called chaturanga, referring to the four branches of the Indian army --- elephants, chariots, horses, and foot soldiers. Early versions were played with dice, a holdover from racing games and going back much further, the divination rituals that might have formed the background of board games generally. There is also a view that rejects any evolution of chautranga from earlier games, and sees it as as having been an invention with purely military associations.
Another possible source for the development of a proto-chess was the ancient Chinese liubo (the six wisdoms, or six learned scholars), a racing/gambling game connected to geomantic divination derived from the astronomical and calendrical reckoning of the shi board. Similar divination games included xiangxi, a symbolic astrological game that could have been a forerunner of xiangqi, the Chinese chess known today. According to this speculation, associated with Joseph Needham, chess shares a common ancestry with the magnetic compass.
Chess appeared in the Persian empire during the last years of the Sassanian dynasty, becoming known as chatrang. By this time, the goal of the game had become established as checkmate of the royal piece (from shah mat, meaning not "The king is dead," as commonly believed, but "The king is helpless"). The Shahnama (Book of Kings), written about 1000 CE by the poet Firdawsi, relates a much older legend concerning the invention of chess and nard, or backgammon, in the course of an ambassadorial exchange/contest between the imperial courts of Hind (India) and Persia to decide who was going to pay tribute to whom. The story was an allegory about the relationship of willed action and fate in the workings of the universe, chess representing human reason and backgammon representing, in part, fate or divine will. Not long after chess arrived in Persia, that realm was conquered by the Muslim Arabs, who took to chatrang with a passion and adopted it with few changes (the chess pieces in the games of India and pre-Islamic Iran were representational figurines; Muslim proscription of idolatrous images necessitated the change to more abstract shapes). The subsequent fortunes of the game, now called shatranj, were long tied to the rise of the Islamic civilization, its dissemination accomplished in the course of the astonishingly rapid spread of the new monotheist religion, which emerged into a late classical world seething with currents of esoteric Gnosis. The collision of Islam with Persian dualist religion --- Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism --- produced a complex and sometimes volatile ferment, with many gnostic elements working their way into early Islam and finding expression in the civil war that resulted in the great schism between Sunni orthodoxy and Shi'ism. The game of shatranj tended to find favor more with the Shi'as, whose main strength radiated from Persia. The first Arab dynasty, the Ummayads of Damascus, for whom the cultural center of gravity was Byzantium, were not particularly keen on chess. But by the ninth century the game was well established at the Abbasid court of Baghdad, where Persian influences were strong despite the political defeat of the Shi'as in the Arab realm. From there chess spread east to China, Korea, and Japan; west to Byzantium and Iberian Peninsula; north to Russia; and south into Ethiopia and points along the Indian Ocean coast of Africa down to Madagascar.
Upon the introduction of shatranj to Spain (al-Andalus) by a Persian musician from Baghdad named Ziriab in 822, it flourished in a favorable composite intellectual court culture made up of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian elements, despite early and intermittent opposition by clerics of all three faiths. Although the game was condemned by some Sunni theologians, the caliph of Baghdad himself, Harun al-Rashid, was an enthusiastic player and supporter. The court of Alfonso X, a Christian king in northern Spain, was very receptive to chess. Alfonso sponsored the production of a beautifully illustrated book about chess and other board games. European chess was at first identical to the Muslim game, played on a unicolor 8x8 board, with pieces colored red and black and representing king, vizier (counsellor), elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers. It was a slow-moving game compared to modern chess. As it became established in northern Spain (Valencia and Catalunya), and then on to France, Italy, and southern Germany, spread by courts of Christian kings and monasteries of the Catholic Church, chess evolved in directions suited to the European feudal order. The changes that gave European chess its distinctive characteristics were the introduction of a checkered board, gradual abandonment of the option of playing with dice, and replacement of the vizier by the queen and of the elephant --- unfamiliar to most Europeans --- by the bishop (a.k.a. fool, standard-bearer, or courier) by the year 1000. Other modifications introduced in the medieval period included castling, the initial double-square move of the pawn, and the en passant rule.
The cult of the Virgin Mary, which took hold in southern France by the twelfth century, was promoted by the Church to co-opt the cult of the idealized Woman (Sophia Maria, or the feminine principle of divine wisdom) associated with Catharism, a gnostic heresy with Manichaeist roots. Although the Cathars and their civilization in the Languedoc were brutally extirpated in the Albigensian crusade, their influence on Western culture was remarkably widespread and persistent. After about 1250 opposition to chess from the Church faded, even to the extent that the game became a favored subject of moral allegories, often associated with Mary. Channeled back into Roman Catholic orthodoxy, the "Queen of Heaven" was seen as God's prime helper in the cosmic chess match with Satan. This development contributed greatly to the elevation in status and power of the chess queen. The link with the cult of idealized romantic love also came of Cathar origins, accompanied by Muslim influences from Sufi music and mystical poetry by way of al-Andalus. Troubadors (southern France), trouveres (northern France), and minnesingers (Germanic lands) offered their illicit courtship to upper-class ladies trapped in loveless political marriages not only as poets, singers, and musicians, but also as chess players. And the game was widely played by the ladies themselves. A mixed-sex chess match became integrated into aristocratic courtship ritual. Amorous chess appears frequently in medieval art and literature, for example, in the Alexander romances and in the great doomed loves of Western legend: Tristan and Iseult drinking their love potion over a game of chess, and Lancelot sending a magic chessboard to Guinevere. There was even a long treatise written in France ca. 1400 titled The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess (Le Livre des Echecs Amoureux Moralises) and concerned with the "love battle" played over the 64 squares.
The last quarter of the fifteenth century produced the real revolution in the development of European chess, the radical augmentation in the powers of movement of queen and bishop, resulting in the new dynamic "queen's chess" that forms the essence of the game as it is played today. This change took place initially in Spain and northern Italy at the moment when the gathering momentum of the Christian reconquista brought about the end of the Muslim caliphate in Spain and the forced conversion or expulsion of Muslims and Jews. The new rules spread very quickly throughout Europe, facilitated by the printing press (one of the first books printed in English was about chess) and possibly also through the agency of the dispersed Jews. Immediately the Western world embarked on its circumglobal maritime explorations, accompanied by the mercantile and settlement conquest of the Americas. Chivalry and courtly love fell on hard times, as seen in the unsparing satire of Cervantes's Don Quixote. This period, characterized by a great leap in the powers of the lady on the board, also saw, ironically, a sharp decline in participation by real women in the game --- a situation that did not begin to change appreciably until late in the twentieth century. It is also the period when chess began a long march to professionalization, and the upper classes turned away from it in favor of card games and backgammon.
Among the shape-shifting chessmen the rook has the most complex and puzzling genealogy. Its association with a castle turret was a relatively late development. The rook may originally have been a jumping piece, like the horse and elephant, adopting its current move when checkmate of the opposing king became the established goal of the game. In some parts of India, the piece we know as the rook was actually an elephant, and the other piece usually represented as an elephant (modern bishop) was a camel. A further complication was that in another early Indian version, the rook was neither a chariot nor an elephant, but a boat. Curiously, the rook as boat appears in several other countries and at other times (e.g., Russia, Siam, and Java). Later on, the ancient confusion of chariot and elephant seemed to resurface in Europe, where the rook was sometimes represented as an elephant with a castle tower on its back (or, alternatively, as a double horse head!). According to Sir William Jones, an eighteenth-century British colonial judge and philologist best known for describing the family relationship of the Indo-European group of languages, the Middle Persian word rukh, from Sanskrit ratha, meant "chariot" for the chess piece, although this etymology has been disputed. The word rukh has several other, possibly related meanings, including "hero" or "champion," "cheek" (as in the flank of an army), and the roc, the fabulous giant eagle-like bird that destroys Sinbad's ship in the Arabian Nights and carries off elephants in its talons. This mythical bird, also known as aanca in Arabic, may have been inspired by the now-extinct Aepyornis, or elephant bird, a kind of giant ostrich that lived in Madagascar into historical times, and which Arab traders may have encountered in their maritime voyages.
Jones also wrote a long poem about chess, titled Caissa, in which Mars, the Roman god of war, whose advances toward the nymph Caissa have initially been spurned, eventually wins her over by transmuting his military bloodlust into the symbolism of a harmless game. Since then, Caissa has been adopted as the "goddess of chess," although she appeared nowhere in the classical pantheon.
Knowledge about the eastward diffusion of chess is much less certain, especially concerning China's possible role in the origins of the game. At any rate, chess games made inroads throughout nearly all of Asia, although, unlike the situation in western Europe, every nation seemed to develop its own unique version, most of which are still played today. Medieval Rus, contrary to expectation, did not receive chess from Byzantium, where it was not greatly popular and was held in even less regard by the Orthodox Church than it was by Latin Christianity in western Europe. It came instead directly from the Arabs, on the Baghdad trade route, and probably arrived in Russia before Christianity did. The Russians eventually adopted the European rules, although the names of the pieces reflect, to this day, the original Middle Eastern terminology (i.e., slon, or elephant, for the bishop; ferz, or vizier, for the queen). Some of the Asian chess games, one group extending southeast through Burma and Siam, another northeast into Tibet and Mongolia, retained the Indo-Persian sculptured figurines as pieces. The other major division, associated with Chinese civilization from the time of the Tang dynasty, as well as countries influenced by it (Korea, Japan, Vietnam), used pieces in the form of disks or other flat shapes with characters written on them, although it is possible that Chinese chess also initially used figurines. In the West, chess became the most prestigious strategy board game, associated by reputation with the aristocracy. In China, however, it became a game of the commoners (merchants and laborers) and its main area of popularity was in the south of the country and among the Chinese diaspora; pride of place went instead to wei'chi (weiqi), or go, as the true game of the northern mandarin court culture.
In what may be a surprise to those who are familiar only with the "international" or European version, chess is in fact not a single game but a large family of related games. In addition to the main Eastern variations --- xiangqi (China), janggi (Korea), shogi (Japan), sittuyin (Burma), makruk (Thailand), and shatar (Mongolia) --- there were also many variants of both shatranj and European chess played on enlarged boards with extra pieces. These games are known collectively as "great chess." Significant examples include Timur's or Tamerlane chess (10x11 squares) from fourteenth-century Persia, grant acedrex (12x12 squares) from the Alfonso X game book, and courier chess (8x12 squares). This last game was played, mostly in Germany, for at least 600 years, and died out with the Holy Roman Empire at the dawn of the nineteenth century, its last outpost being in Stroebeck, a famous "chess-playing village." Grant acedrex featured lions, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and a piece called the aanca, similar to but differentiated from the rook. Even more extravagant were the large shogi variants from medieval Japan, some of which included dozens of pieces on each side, the standard army augmented by numerous animals both real and mythological, as well as pieces representing Buddhist figures or concepts in giant fairytale battles.
Among the many historical variants of chess, the dominance of the European game with the potent queen emerged alongside colonialism, beginning with the "Catholic monarchs" Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; the Spaniards spread the game througout their American empire, even taking pains to teach it to the last Aztec and Inca emperors prior to killing them. Later the western version of chess was spread even more internationally by the vast empires of Britain and France, usurping the "old game" (shatranj) in its original homelands of India, Persia, Turkey, and the Arab nations. There is a fine movie by the Bengali director Satyajit Ray, The Chess Players, which illustrates this process by using the dynamic changes in the rules of chess as a metaphor for the dynamism of British/Western imperialism sweeping all before it. On the eve of the Great Mutiny of 1857, the English East India Company has been expanding its influence on the subcontinent. The ruler of one of the last independent kingdoms in India, an effete aesthete who prefers art and poetry to matters of state, is a figurehead faced with a political checkmate by the British. The film centers on two figures in his court, friends who lose themselves in endless games of shatranj to the dismay of their neglected wives. These comic figures are oblivious to the larger game of history that is enveloping their world as they are outmaneuvered and conquered by the powerful imperialist queen, Victoria.
The imperialism of European chess was also carried by Russia in its geopolitical sphere (and in the name of anti-imperialism!). For example, when Mongolia came under the tutelage of the USSR, the form of chess native to that country was discouraged in favor of the European game, in the name of modernization. For some, modernization/Westernization is self-imposed; the large-scale adoption of European chess has been under way in the People's Republic of China, in the midst of dizzying ambitions to replicate the industrial revolution of the West. Although western chess was little known in China before the 1990s, within an astonishingly short time, the Chinese have vaulted close to the top of the world's chess players. Even so, that country's own traditional form of chess, xiangqi, remains the most popular board game in the world by virtue of the sheer number of players. In other countries with their own unique national forms of chess --- Thailand, Korea, and Japan --- European chess is known but is not at all popular. It is worthy to note that these are among the few countries in the world that remained outside the sphere of direct colonial rule by Western powers.
In the history of European chess, the early dominance of Spain, where the new rules had first emerged, declined along with the Spanish empire. The next center of chess activity was in northern Italy, but the theoretical development of the game remained largely unrealized until the eighteenth century when players in that country (Modena) and France carried it to a higher level. Increasingly scientific principles were applied to the study of the game, and chess became identified with the Enlightenment and a staple of cafe society in Paris and London. The most famous of these venues was the Cafe de la Regence, where philosophes and revolutionaries played chess. The American and French revolutions laid the ground for the democratization of the once "royal game." This spirit can perhaps be seen in Philidor's famous saying that pawns are "the very life [soul] of the game." Philidor, considered the first modern chess master, and whose genius doubled as a musical composer, dominated the scene in the late eighteenth century. This period saw the last flourishing of the gentleman-amateurs. French preeminence was challenged and surpassed by England when Shakespearean scholar Howard Staunton defeated wine merchant Pierre de St.-Amant in 1843. Paul Morphy of New Orleans, U.S.A., arrived in Europe in 1858, defeated all the best players except for Staunton, who evaded a match, and promptly disavowed chess. After this momentary shooting star, the ascendancy of France and Britain yielded to Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian empire, where a new and stronger crop of masters, most of emancipated Jewish background such as Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker, had arrived to build the classical or scientific school that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement toward an organized world championship picked up momentum, and the last minor local differences in the rules of chess among European nations were standardized by about 1900. The European bourgeoisie began to sponsor international tournaments, often in spa and seaside resorts as tourist attractions, and the prize money enabled some top players to eke out a precarious living as professionals, although nearly all of the chess greats had to make their living at other professions, with chess as a sideline --- a situation that has remained commonplace in the Western world to this day. The title of grandmaster, a term with sporadic previous nineteenth-century usage, was conferred by Tsar Nicholas II on the finalists in the 1914 St. Petersburg tournament, right on the eve of the great crackup of the Great War.
Chess had always been tremendously popular in Russia, and the country had already begun to field world-class players, the most outstanding of whom was Alexander Alekhine, who was of aristocratic background. Soon after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, the Bolsheviks embarked on a campaign of comprehensive promotion of the game among the masses as state policy. This program was without precedent in any other country, nor had it been anticipated within the socialist movement. Marx had been a dedicated if mediocre player in London. Lenin and Trotsky both loved chess, and their indulgence in Zurich and Vienna during their political exile was of the bohemian cafe variety typical of the nineteenth century. Although the Bolshevik leaders were obliged to abandon the seductions of chess in order to pursue their political obsession and destiny, the game would become officially incorporated into the political culture of the USSR.
The figure most responsible for launching the Soviet chess program was N.V. Krylenko, Commissar of War in the Bolshevik government and then Commissar of Justice. A fanatical ideologue of Red terror during the civil war and again in the purges of the 1930s, he met his fate when he was himself purged, executed, and later rehabilitated after Stalin's death. Krylenko organized tournaments and even edited the chess magazine 64. In schools, factories, and the Red Army the game was systematically encouraged, in part to combat popular indulgence in gambling and vodka (the latter especially always a great curse in Russia). In the 1920s the Soviet experiment with training a new empire of chess masters was still struggling to find a firm footing, and its results were not yet remarkable. When a new international governing body of chess, FIDE (Federation Internationale des Echecs) was founded in 1924, the Soviets initially refused to join it, building their own organizations instead. Later on, FIDE itself became a heavily Soviet-influenced entity. Despite all the bombast about chess being a perfect expression of dialectical materialism and shaper of the new man, however, a study conducted by Soviet psychologists in the 1920s included the admission that "as an activity motivated from within, games are satisfying in themselves, pure experience stripped of any utilitarian significance." This truly playful aspect of chess appears in Chess Fever, a Soviet film in the romantic comedy genre that uses the famous Moscow tournament of 1925 as its backdrop, and in which the great champion Jose Raul Capablanca himself has a cameo role. Stakhanovites of chess didn't do much to increase productivity. But chess had become well established in the USSR by the mid-1930s and began to produce stunning victories in international competitions. Chess masters became members of a Soviet elite, their careers generously supported by the state, with access to things off limits to most citizens of the USSR, including opportunities to travel abroad.
The phase during which the revolution in Russia might have been a genuine expression of workers' sovereignty was very limited before yielding to the increasingly separate power of the party bureaucracy, but for the Jews of the former tsarist Russian empire, the revolution entailed a real emancipation from the discrimination and pogroms of the ancien regime, and many of them placed great hopes in communism. In the atmosphere of intense emphasis on chess, the Jewish preeminence in the game that had become manifest in central Europe from about the middle of the nineteenth century became still more pronounced. As the massive investment in chess began to bear fruit, a majority of the strongest players, including Mikhail Botvinnik, the first great hero of Soviet chess, were of Jewish origin. Despite his own antisemitic bent, Stalin recognized the propaganda value of the chess program and encouraged its continuation. The growing Soviet dominance was achieved in part because German-, Polish- and Hungarian-Jewish chess players were being driven into exile by the Nazis. Among those in flight from the Third Reich was the aging former world champion Lasker.
The Nazis themselves did not neglect chess, even producing a propaganda film about the village of Stroebeck aiming to prove the superiority of "Aryan" chess. Alekhine, who had been world champion for much of the 1920s and '30s, became an emigre from the USSR in France. A match between him and Botvinnik scheduled to be played in 1939 was postponed by the outbreak of the Second World War. Alekhine was still living in France when it came under Nazi occupation, and he subsequently became a collaborator, playing in numerous tournaments in Germany and German-occupied countries. He also authored and/or signed several antisemitic articles that were published in the Nazi press. It is still unclear whether Alekhine's motives sprang from true conviction, opportunism, or (as he later claimed) duress. At any rate, the Nazi connection ruined his career and has damaged his reputation. Alekhine died in Lisbon soon after the war in mysterious circumstances, prompting rumors that he was done in by a French Resistance (most likely Communist) assassination squad.
Chess outside the Soviet Union was undergoing its own avant-garde in the 1920s with the "hypermodern" revolution, named by Tartakower but whose principal exponents were Nimzovich and Reti. A kind of neo-Romanticism characterized by flank openings, it eschewed symmetry and early occupation of the center, principles of the scientific school that had congealed into dogma. The hypermodern experiments paralleled the abstraction of cubism and other movements in visual art, as well as the atonal musical compositions of the time.
One of the more interesting aspects of the modern period from an antipolitical perspective is the prominent fascination chess exerted on many participants in the dada and surrealist movements, even though Andre Breton was not greatly fond of it. The greatest adept was Marcel Duchamp, who kept company with surrealism but also kept it at arm's length, and whose life could serve as an examplar of individualist anarchism. Duchamp largely abandoned the making of art objects after the Large Glass ("The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even") in favor of indulging his long-standing obsession with chess, even becoming at one point the strongest player in France, not counting Alekhine. In his words, "It has all the beauty of art --- and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position." And what is its social position? "Chess has no social purpose." Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Richter, John Cage, and others designed their own chess sets and produced films, paintings, and even musical compositions about chess. These works were exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York during World War II, when many of these artists were in exile from Nazi-controlled Europe.
The dadas and surrealists were not much interested in experimenting with the rule parameters of chess, but rather with the architecture of the pieces and the mythopoetic associations the game called forth. For example, their explorations did not extend to the rich panoply of historical variations on European chess, or to its Eastern cousins such as shogi or xiangqi. Nor did they ever discover go, although some of their illustrious contemporaries, such as Emanuel Lasker and his cousin Edward Lasker, also by then resident in the United States, had begun to play it. The productions of the surrealists represented to some extent a revival of European medieval associations of chess with magic and eros, but now informed by Freud's psychoanalytic theories. In the mating of kings and queens there is a drama of sexual power at play. The mythological figure of the minotaur, a creature part man and part bull that devours young maidens, was a favorite icon of surrealist art, appearing most famously in Picasso's oeuvre and as the title of a journal, but also in Max Ernst's chess-related sculpture The King Playing with the Queen. Here it is the man dominating the woman. But, considering the power of the queen, the tables can be turned, the horns of the minotaur becoming the horns of the cuckold. In chess the king may be the most important piece, but it is the queen that dominates the board, protecting her king but also subordinating him because she only "mates" with the opposing king --- in which act she takes on still another power by analogy with the praying mantis that devours her mate.
To his disappointment, Duchamp discovered that his skill over the board, though considerable, was insufficient to raise him to the ranks of the real grandmasters of his time, who were taking on the mantle of scientific man-machines. The game on that level was all too rational for an artist with a refined sense of the absurd. What many now perceive as the stagnation of orthodox FIDE chess, a combination of the inherent limitations of the game (e.g., too many draws, and exhaustively analyzed openings memorized by rote) and sordid political machinations, had already begun to set in before the Second World War. As far back as the 1920s, Capablanca, world champion no less, sensed that chess was becoming played out. His suggestion was to augment the game to a larger board with two extra pieces intermediate in strength between rook and queen. Capablanca's chess was not all that new, since it was just a slight modification of an idea going back to the seventeenth century. Duchamp gave no indication of familiarity with it. He did, however, contribute a fine specimen of absurdity to the literature of chess. Opposition and Sister Squares Reconciled, coauthored with Vitaly Halberstadt, is a treatise on endgame positions so rare as to be of no practical assistance to players of any grade seeking to improve their game, encouraging instead an appreciation of chess on the plane of its useless beauty. Duchamp's interest in chance led him to dream of a synthesis of chess with roulette. Given the surrealist fascination with the aleatory in such forms as "psychic automatism" and fortuitous encounter, the reintroduction of dice into the game might have seemed like a natural continuation.
After the Second World War, however, the dada-surrealist school of chess was overshadowed by the "Soviet school of chess," which consolidated its dominance upon the death of Alekhine and the victories of Botvinnik, Tal, Smyslov, Petrosian, and other grandmasters. Throughout the 1950s and '60s the USSR kept a lock on the world championship. Chess entered the arena of cold war contest as one of the most prominent advertisements of Soviet accomplishment and cultural superiority over all rivals. The challenge did not go unmet. Despite the formidable depth and resources of Soviet chess, the USSR just barely prevailed in the 1970 USSR vs. the Rest of the World match. And soon after that Bobby Fischer, the obsessive prodigy from Brooklyn, fought his way to the world championship, his personal quest for the summit of chess entwined with an anti-Communist crusade. Having attained his goal, Fischer refused to defend his title and forfeited it back to the Russians in 1975. The political circus of the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972 had a worthy successor in the first confrontation between Anatoly Karpov, the representative of official Soviet chess, and Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet defector playing for Switzerland, in 1978. Highlights of the psychological warfare in this match involved a parapsychologist planted by the Karpov team in the audience to unsettle Korchnoi's concentration. Korchnoi retaliated by bringing in two American gurus of the Ananda Marga sect in saffron robes to counter the Soviet hypnotist. Chess as a political spectacle was brilliantly satirized in the 1980s by Fernando Arrabal in The Tower Struck by Lightning, a novel that imagines a world championship won by a Spanish anarchist (of sorts) detoured from a path into the Jesuit order by sexual obsessions, against a Swiss physicist and Marxist follower of Enver Hoxha who runs a terrorist cell that has kidnapped a high-ranking member of the Soviet Politburo.
Reality threatens to exceed even Arrabal's rich fantasy as a large quotient of political weirdness continues to attend the world of high-level competitive chess. Garry Kasparov, last of the world champions to emerge from the great chess machine of the USSR, turned away from the game and eventually became an editor of the Wall Street Journal and supporter of the American-led war in Iraq. Giving up art for chess seems completely reasonable, but giving up chess for politics, and substituting neoconservative for neostalinist politics at that, is an ass-backwards dead end. In his campaign against the Putin regime, Kasparov has made an odd alliance with Edward Limonov, the flamboyant fuehrer of the National Bolshevik Party. A more bizarre figure is Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a post-Soviet millionaire who is simultaneously president of FIDE and autocratic ruler of the impoverished republic of Kalmykia, a semi-autonomous part of the Russian Federation. He has held both of these posts for a number of years. Ilyumzhinov claims to have been abducted by a UFO, was friends with Saddam Hussein, and is both a supporter of Vladimir Putin and an admirer of George W. Bush.
Today Russia and other former Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia particularly), and Eastern European countries such as Hungary maintain an eroding dominance in chess, as the state-subsidized chess programs have been dismantled and much of their talent has emigrated to the benefit of other countries. In addition, China and India have emerged as new powerhouses. Among Western nations, it is Iceland where chess enjoys probably its greatest popularity in proportion to the size of the country's population, and where love of the game has a long history. At least two of the "founding fathers" of the United States, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, had an abiding interest in chess, and since the twentieth century the highest concentration of talent and interest in the game has been in the New York City area. The U.S.A. has produced two great geniuses of the game, Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer, whose rise and fall were spectacular and tragic. In the contemporary period, aside from the anomaly of Fischer and a few other rare prodigies, many of the country's strongest players are East European or former USSR immigrants, among whom are a fair number of women. In urban areas the game has made gains in popularity among African American and Latino players. In overall terms, however, chess remains marginal to mainstream American culture.
Although it may have lost much of its association with the cold war and the lousy memories that evokes, chess has not escaped a deepening sense of stagnation, which has been crowned by the recent and ongoing cybernetic conquest of the game. Kasparov was bested by an IBM supercomputer, Kramnik could do no better, and now we will have to assume that even world champions must bow before the god of artificial intelligence. The sterile accomplishment of machines playing chess with a technical perfection beyond mere human capabilities, while the human players increasingly face suspicion of cheating with the clandestine help of computers --- is this the real endgame?
Chess continues, however, to exert its daemonic attraction and well-known addictive quality. The nineteenth-century English master Joseph H. Blackburne cursed it as a form of "mental alcohol" and vowed not to let his own children learn to play it. From Morphy's breakdown to Fischer's descent into antisemitism, truly hardcore chess players have had a long-standing, though not necessarily justified, reputation for social ineptitude (or worse) and emotional instability. The pleasures and torments of chess tend to appeal, as Duchamp put it, to "madmen of a certain quality," although that quality, whatever it might be, is extremely variable.
Imperfection of the game drives an endless quest for improvements that has produced the many thousands of variants, yielding a handful of superior quality. Possibly the pluralist variant experiments will either reinvigorate the orthodox game or, eventually, replace it in favor of a chess for fun rather than the "chess for blood" of professional nationalistic competition. This would entail a renaissance of the amateur (in the literal sense of lover) but is unlikely to take place except in the course of the totality of life becoming liberated from work and money. "What must be changed is the game itself, not the pieces," said Breton. He was on the right track, although it could be amended slightly: what must be changed is the game itself, not only the pieces.
RESOURCES
Bibliography:
Arrabal, Fernando. The Tower Struck by Lightning. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988 [translation of La torre herida por el rayo, Ediciones Destino, S.A., 1983].
Cockburn, Alexander. Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death. New York: Village Voice/Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Gollon, John. Chess Variations: Ancient, Regional, and Modern. Rutland, Vt. & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1968.
Hooper, David, and Kenneth Whyld, eds. The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed. New York: Dover, 1959.
List, Larry, ed. The Imagery of Chess Revisited. New York: Noguchi Museum & George Braziller, Inc., 2006.
Murray, H.J.R. A History of Chess. London: Oxford University Press, 1913.
Plisetsky, Dmitry, and Sergey Voronkov. Russians Versus Fischer, 2nd ed. London: Everyman Chess, 2005.
Saidy, Anthony, and Norman Lessing. The World of Chess. New York: Random House, 1974.
Yalom, Marilyn. Birth of the Chess Queen: A History. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Films:
8x8: A Chess Sonata (Hans Richter, 1957)
Chess Fever [Shakhmatnaya goryachka] (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1925)
Entr'Acte (Rene Clair, 1924)
The Chess Players [Shatranj ke Khilari] (Satyajit Ray, 1977)
Websites:
http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-jostenge
http://history.chess.free.fr
http://www.goddesschess.com
http://www.chessvariants.com
http://www.chessbase.com/index.asp
http://www.chesscafe.com
http://www.wxf.org/xq/in.htm
http://www.shogi.net
Category: Chess | Posted by: simurgh | Add comment
08/13: Games and Anarchy: Introductory Remarks
No claims will be made that any particular game (chess or go or bowling) is somehow inherently related to anarchism or to revolution. However, as a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon in human societies, games are a worthy and important subject for critical inquiry. The principal axis along which games connect to anarchy is the ludic principle itself. If there is a human essence, the world of play seems to embody it better than anything else I can think of, and its utopian, joyful, and creative aspects do in fact seem inherently anarchical even if they are rule bound. Time devoted to play is time not suffered in production or other stressful and unwelcome activities. Indeed, during absorption in play people tend to suspend their awareness of the passage of time itself. Play brings out the best of the natural self and provides a glimpse of what the world could be.At the same time, however, games are subject to pressures of the marketplace and hierarchical institutions, and can serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Just think of the Olympics and the gigantic industries of organized sports, with teams of nearly cyborg professionals performing for millions of passive spectators. As situationists and others have shown, modern society is domination in the mode of leisure as well as in the mode of work.
We are concerned primarily with traditional games (mostly board games, but also playing cards, dominoes, and such) in the "public domain," and not so much with modern proprietary games, which in most cases are derivatives of very old prototypes. Board games fall into several broad categories: alignment games, hunting games, war games, racing games, and mancala games. Many of them have a fascinating history in themselves, while touching on many other aspects of the history and culture of the countries or regions from which they sprung or through which they passed, calling forth associations with folklore, mythology, mystery, and romance, and working their way into poetry, literature, and visual arts. Some games are of remote enough antiquity, or are disconnected enough from modern industrialized culture, as to be of anthropological interest. A seeming paradox is that games in the specific forms they have come down to us are products of civilization, yet they function as expressions of the primal activity of play.
Three games, or families of games, in particular, hold our interest: chess, go, and kriegspiels. The common denominator is the enactment of war and strategy in the form of games, which these three groups represent in greatest depth and complexity. Is not war the antithesis of what we, as the negators of the existing world, want to achieve? Clearly, it's another paradox, for although our goal may be a society in which war has become a thing of the past, yet the path to its achievement is a fight in many dimensions. And so, a facile antiwar position will not do. "Neither your war nor your peace," as the surrealists put it. The problem of war is an ancient one, even predating civilization. In some cases, primitive war even works against the emergence of the civilized state, with its far more devastating wars (Clastres, *Society Against the State*). Our play is serious, a struggle to vanquish real war through the art of the social war, both on and off the board.
A BRIEF LIST OF RESOURCES
Bibliography:
___________
Bell, R.C. *Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations*, revised ed., two vols. bound as one. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Caillois, Roger. *Man, Play, and Games*. University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1961].
Huizinga, Johan. *Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture*. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 [1955].
Murray, H.J.R. *A History of Board Games Other Than Chess*. London: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Schmittberger, R. Wayne. *New Rules for Classic Games*. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992.
Websites:
___________
Board Games Studies magazine --- http://www.boardgamesstudies.org/
Elliott Avedon Museum & Archive of Games --- http:www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/
The Online Guide to Traditional Games --- http://www tradgames.org.uk/index.html
The World of Abstract Games --- http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/
Game servers:
____________
Kriegspiel --- http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php
Brainking --- http://brainking.com
Kurnik Online Games --- http://www.kurnik.org/
Ludoteka --- http://www.ludoteka.com/juegos.html?hizk=en
Richard's Play-By-Email Server --- http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/
Free Internet Chess Server --- http://www.freechess.org/
Shogi Club 24 --- http://www.shogidojo.com/eng/engindex.htm
Thai Chess Online --- http://www.thaibg.com/TSOnline/index.php
Club Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) --- http://www.clubxiangqi.com
Category: Games and Anarchy: Introductory Remarks | Posted by: simurgh | Add comment
01/11: Terrain and Units
The innovations (although the history of wargaming definitely includes a lot of examples of this) of kriegspiel include the addition of terrain and the explicit necessity of line-of-sight communication. This obviously improves the metaphor beyond how chess or go represents armed conflict. In the last post I mentioned how the game boils down to being a "Clausewitz simulator" which is accurate. Debord was obsessed with Clausewitz and oriented the game for the level of technology of his time.The image I am including here lists the units: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery (infantry and horse drawn), transmission units (infantry and horse) that serve as signalmen, forts (defensive structures), and arsenals (the target of the game. Metaphor for command center). The general strategy involves aligning the units in such a way that their fire can be concentrated on points (units, forts, or arsenals). I'll get into the minutiae of how the units interact in the next post. This is an introduction to the units.
Because both sides are supposed to place their units blind (like the chess variant) the initiation of battle can actually be the end of battle. In one of the games that I played with a comrade they didn't realize that the defensive point of the game was to defend their own arsenals while attacking mine and proceeded to place their units around the forts (which are fixed positions like the arsenals) in a sort of Maginot line leaving their command centers entirely unoccupied. This was a short game.
When I first read about the game in Bracken's Guy Debord: Revolutionary (where he translated the rules that I used in the booklet for the game) I was anxious to play it. It took almost 8 years until I did and it involved a great deal of labor (on my part and on my friend Artnoose's part). As we were finishing the game I reached out to Bracken who gave me this information (that after the hours of my frustration at finding appropriate pieces sent me into an hour of uncontrollable laughter).
Arsenals and forts are permanently fixed on the board as follows: North arsenals at D8 and B15; North forts at B8, I13 and H21. South arsenals at T3 and T23; South forts at O23, M3 and L15.
If you look at the image of the board you will see that this both orients the game with two lines of defense (and the arsenals behind) but also transforms the game from being seemingly free form to being considerably constrained. This actually leads one (or me) to think about the most rational variant of the game being one where there is the possibility of user placed forts and arsenals (as would be more appropriate to a battlefield but could imply some ridiculous permutations if not checked.
Category: Kriegspiel | Posted by: aragorn | Add comment
01/09: What is Kriegspiel?
The goal of this blog is as a place where anarchists who are interested in war games can get together and discuss them.The name of the blog is the name of two different games. One of them is a chess variant. It is a blind variant where you can only see your own board and where a third person serves as a referee.
That is not the game we are (as) interested in. Instead this site draws its name from a game designed by Guy Debord. This game is best described as a Clausewitz simulator. We will get into an introduction to the game over the next couple of weeks.
We (as in Anarchy magazine) actually sell a handmade version of the game.
Here is the board.
Category: Kriegspiel | Posted by: aragorn | 6 Comments