The Immortal Game Read online

  However awkwardly, the Soviets had their title back. In chess, as in life, a win is a win.

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Moves 17–19

  NOW THE CASUAL GAME between Anderssen and Kieseritzky was transformed. Anderssen, whose g1 Rook was under attack from Kieseritzky’s c5 Bishop, did a shocking and unsettling thing: he ignored it, instead launching a series of moves that turned an insignificant practice game into something immortal.

  17. Nd5

  (White Knight to d5)

  In moving his Knight further up the board, Anderssen not only ignored the threat to his King’s Rook, he also reexposed his Queenside. In fact, by attacking the Black Queen (dashed line), he forced the Queen to move somewhere—essentially inviting Kieseritzky to take the b2 Pawn and attack his other Rook.

  This was unusual and intriguing, to say the least. Rooks are widely considered to be the second-most-powerful pieces on the board, behind the Queen. A player like Anderssen doesn’t accidentally expose two Rooks. What was going on?

  17….Q×b2

  (Black Queen captures Pawn at b2)

  Suspicious but not yet aware how an opportunity to go after two Rooks could put him in jeopardy, Kieseritzky took the bait. He captured a Pawn with his Queen and threatened Anderssen’s a1 Rook.

  18. Bd6

  (White Bishop to d6)

  Anderssen’s reaction? Again, he ignored the colossal threat. As if not even seeing both of his Rooks in jeopardy, Anderssen now moved his Bishop two spaces—nominally threatening Kieseritzky’s Bishop but, again, essentially inviting him to use that Bishop to capture the King’s Rook. If Kieseritzky didn’t know better, this kind of play could be mistaken for that of a bumbler who was barely even aware of how the pieces moved.

  18….B×g1

  (Black Bishop captures Rook on g1)

  Seizing the opportunity, Kieseritzky captured Anderssen’s g1 Rook. How would Anderssen respond? Save the other Rook? Capture the Bishop?

  19. e5

  (White Pawn to e5)

  Another stunning move by Anderssen, who was now not only neglecting to take Kieseritzky’s Bishop in return for his lost Rook and sacrificing his second Rook in as many moves, but was also openly inviting a check in the process. The biggest risk of all was that Anderssen would soon be put on the defensive, never again to regain the offensive. He was making what could very well have been his last offensive move of the game. At this point, Kieseritzky could be forgiven for wondering if an exhausted Anderssen was throwing the game.

  In hindsight, this tiny Pawn move was regarded as pure genius by analysts because of how White managed to seal off the Black Queen from a diagonal retreat in defense of her King.

  19….Q×a1+

  (Black Queen captures Rook on a1; puts White in check)

  Kieseritzky now took Anderssen’s second Rook and put him in check. On the surface, it seemed like a devastating move, and not one that a sensible opponent would openly invite. But a closer look reveals that this particular check didn’t pack a lot of punch. It did indeed put Anderssen on the defensive, but Kieseritzky’s follow-up move wasn’t obvious. With five of his major pieces still stuck on his back rank (i.e., undeveloped), he didn’t have sufficient firepower to deliver a crushing blow.

  By contrast, Anderssen had aggressively developed several pieces and Pawns. He’d sacrificed a couple of limbs to get there, but his attack position was admirable. If he could regain the offensive—a big if—he looked to be in a strong position to finish Kieseritzky off.

  AT THE TAIL END of his career, Marcel Duchamp was frequently asked why chess had become such an important part of his life. “I always loved complexity,” he said. “With chess one creates beautiful problems.”

  That sentiment—beautiful problems—could serve as a motto for twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, all of whom had to extract truth and beauty from complexity in one way or another. Even as nations exploited chess for political gain, the ancient game lost no significance as a thought tool. A stream of modern artists, scholars, and scientists leaned on the game to work through problems of their age. “As metaphor, model and allegory, chess performs powerful cultural work,” offered Pennsylvania State University social theorist Martin Rosenberg. The world had changed substantially since A.D. 600, but chess still somehow had that fundamental ability to explain the unexplainable, make visible the abstract, and extract simple truths from complex worlds.

  This was not the intellectually cohesive world of John Locke and Benjamin Franklin, where all available knowledge could still fit into a single library building and where adventurous thinkers could simultaneously engage in medicine, engineering, philosophy, and diplomacy. The twentieth century saw knowledge explode and all thought become hyperspecialized, with each specialty employing its own idiomatic terminology and belief system. Naturally, every discipline needed its own particular metaphors to help convey meaning. What’s striking about chess in this era is that it transcended the many narrow corridors of language and thought, finding equal utility in the behavioral labs of cognitive science (already discussed in Chapter 7), the silicon forests of artificial intelligence (to be discussed in Chapter 11), the notebooks of novelists, the whiteboards of physicists, the logical matrices of philosophers, and on and on. Three quick examples will demonstrate the game’s modern breadth:

  • Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded by many as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, was utterly fascinated by chess, referring to the game nearly two hundred times in his writings. As a contained entity with simple, fixed rules and near-limitless possibility, chess served as a model through which he could study other abstract systems such as mathematics and language. Chess was his logic and systems abacus, always at the ready to work out a particular thought problem.

  • The legendary American physicist and physics teacher Richard Feynman relied heavily on chess in his lectures at the California Institute of Technology (later published in the 1994 book Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher) to help decode the scientific process for his students. Walking through detailed references to the game, Feynman conveyed the process of both devising and testing hypotheses.

  • Italo Calvino, the whimsical and postmodern Italian author of Cosmicomics, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and other influential fictions, was impressed by chess’s ability to transform limitless data into a simple impression. In his novel Invisible Cities, the vast empire of the aging Mongol warrior Kublai Khan has grown beyond his ability to govern and even beyond his comprehension. He sees his holdings only as “an endless, formless ruin.” Enter the young Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who surveys dozens of the Khan’s cities and reports in great detail back to him. When Polo relays his experience by shifting around symbolic objects on a large checkered tile floor, Kublai Khan becomes convinced chess is all they need to communicate. “Kublai was a keen chess player….He thought: ‘If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.’” As with Wittgenstein and Feynman, chess for Calvino was a window into grasping complex systems. For anyone interested in language or mathematics or geography, what really mattered wasn’t the catalogue of individual words or numbers or alleyways so much as the system that bound them together. Rules, governed by logic, were the key to understanding and administering complex worlds.

  Chess in the twentieth century was so pervasive, in fact, that it became a central part of the study of metaphor itself. In his essay “Chess Rhizome: Mapping Metaphor Theory in Hypertext,” Penn State professor Martin Rosenberg attempts to decode what he calls “the interdisciplinary dimensions of metaphor.” He also poses perhaps the most pressing question about its power: Does metaphor work by bringing language close to reality or by effectively—seductively—shaping reality? If the latter, the use of metaphor needs to be taken extremely seriously; its choice
and precise deployment can shape cultures and nurture or destroy lives. This idea also suggests that even the best and most agreeable metaphors should be treated skeptically, monitored for cognitive trickery, and regularly reexamined in hindsight to ensure that their consequences are desired and beneficial.

  SOME IN the twentieth century applied chess to difficult thought problems, and others were drawn to its aesthetics. Marcel Duchamp’s resonant phrase beautiful problems referred, of course, not to the physical beauty of the board or its pieces, but to the dynamic struggle of the game and its unpredictable outcomes. Chess was, to most serious players and observers, a highly ritualized aesthetic event. “All chess-players are artists,” Duchamp declared in 1952. Not surprisingly, an awful lot of serious artists were fascinated by the game.

  For a brief time in the 1920s, chess and its dynamic energy had seemed imperiled. Over several decades, Wilhelm Steinitz’s Scientific revolution had generated such intensive analysis that many feared the game was nearing some sort of intellectual end point, its creative possibilities nearly exhausted. Cuban sensation José Raul Capablanca, world champion from 1921 to 1927, publicly expressed this sentiment.

  To the rescue came the third great style of chess play, after the Romantic school and the Scientific school: the Hypermodern school, a paradigm-shattering gift to chess from Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Reti, and other players in the 1920s and ’30s. In a sharp turn away from over four centuries of master-level play, the Hypermodernists sought (among other things) not to “overburden” the center of the board with Pawns early in the game. Instead, they first developed their Knights and Bishops to put pressure on the center, operating from the flanks. (Eventually a Hypermodern player might attack an opponent’s centerboard Pawns after those Pawns had become overextended or vulnerable in some other way.) Even more than this one radical idea, the Hypermodernists rejected the Scientific school’s proposition that only one set of principles could be applied to the game. In doing so, they reaffirmed chess’s limitlessness. The lesson of the Hypermodern revolution was that anything was still possible, that discovery of the game had only just begun.

  Since the Hypermodern pioneers were Jewish, Nazi collaborator Alexander Alekhine later railed against the new style as “fear to struggle, doubts about one’s own spiritual force, a sad picture of intellectual self-destruction.” The truth, as Alekhine knew better than most, was precisely the opposite: Hypermodernism was not about fear, but about the love of intellectual adventure. It was, in fact, archetypal modernism—the spirit of breaking decisively with past styles in order to make a new aesthetic contribution to the world. Thus it was closely connected to the early twentieth-century intellectual ferment that spawned the fiction of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, the theater of Brecht and Pirandello, the fabulist tales of Jorge Luis Borges, the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the experimental music of John Cage, and the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp. These intellectual-aesthetic warriors and many others were part of an existential reach for something new and great; they willingly, even eagerly, tore down old conventions to get where they needed to be. As different as their works were from one another, there was a seamless spiritual connection running between them. Not surprisingly, many of these avant-gardists were also dedicated chess players, and several incorporated the game into their work.

  Duchamp led the way. Having enjoyed chess since childhood, his passion for it escalated in his twenties until it apparently began to eclipse his interest in producing art. If his peers thought this intense phase would quickly pass, they miscalculated. In 1921 Duchamp informed the painter Francis Picabia that he wanted to be a professional chess player and started on an intensive course of training and competition. In the early 1930s he played for the French national chess team, which was then led by world champion Alexander Alekhine. (Records still exist of an Alekhine–Duchamp game during an Alekhine simultaneous display, which Duchamp won.)

  Duchamp did not, of course, stop being an artist. Chess did not so much overshadow Duchamp’s aesthetic as merge with it, according to his biographer Calvin Tomkins. What to the outside world looked like Duchamp leaving his art behind was, in his own mind, a logical extension of where he had been heading all along. “Chess was much more than a retreat or a refuge,” writes Tomkins. “It was a near-perfect expression of the Cartesian side of his nature…. Duchamp’s working methods were marked by an almost mathematical precision, and one of the things he loved about chess was that its most brilliant innovations took place within a framework of strict and unbendable rules.”

  Duchamp, in other words, was in love with logic and its consequences. His cheerful curiosity seemed to compel him to see beauty not just in colors and shapes but also in the very components of thought. “Chess is a marvelous piece of Cartesianism,” he told Tomkins, “and so imaginative that it doesn’t even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent—you don’t see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery—it’s just pure logical conclusion.”

  In the 1930s Duchamp struck up a friendship and chess camaraderie with the writer Samuel Beckett. They met through Duchamp’s close companion Mary Reynolds, a surrealist artist. Beckett had also been a lifelong addict of the game, playing on the chess team at Dublin’s Trinity College and often incorporating it into his work. “Assumption,” his first published short story, contained allusions to chess. As a player, Beckett had closely followed the chess column that Duchamp was writing at the time for the Paris daily newspaper Ce Soir.

  The two were not evenly matched. Duchamp was one of the best players in France, and no doubt swept Beckett off the board in most of their encounters. But still they enjoyed each other’s company, and continued to play. The two came together again in the summer of 1940, converging on the Atlantic coastal town of Arcachon, southwest of Bordeaux, as they fled the Nazi onslaught. All summer they played lengthy chess games together in a seafront café. While their conversations were not recorded, we can imagine that they discussed their mutual interest in chess’s dialectic between total freedom and complete constriction, between choice and futility. Beckett, one of the most pessimistic writers of the century, was fascinated by the futility of human action and by human interdependence, among other matters. He also consistently worked to undermine every possible aspect of conventional narrative, and once remarked that the ideal chess game for him would end with the pieces back in their starting positions.

  Endgame, the distinct and stark final phase of chess, particularly fascinated both Duchamp and Beckett. In the classic endgame scenario, only a handful of pieces are left on the board—often just a King and one or two other pieces on each side—and the thrilling, maddening complexity of middlegame has been supplanted by a barren geometric landscape where one simple blunder can easily cost either player the game. For some, endgame play is intuitive, for others, it must be studied intensively; many lopsided chess positions have been quickly reversed by crafty endgame players.

  In 1932 Duchamp published his only chess book, the elegiacally titled Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, which focused on one particular endgame scenario. In a domain where thousands of books are written about specific openings and very specific strategies, Opposition holds, even today, the strange distinction of being perhaps the most obscure chess book ever published. The book had a limited printing—which made sense, since its subject matter was limited to a particular board position that was very, very rare. “[It] would interest no chess player,” Duchamp bluntly remarked. “Even the chess champions don’t read the book, since the problem it poses only comes up once in a lifetime. They’re end-game problems of possible games but so rare as to be nearly Utopian.”

  The book was obviously more of a thought experiment than a chess guide, and perhaps its most profound effect had nothing to do with the game. Nearly two decades after his series of chess games with Duchamp, Beckett published his second play, Endgame, which was inspired in part by Duchamp’s endgame chess book. Asi
de from its title, Beckett’s play does not explicitly refer to chess, but alludes strongly to the feeling of pointlessness often experienced by a chess player in the final moves. The protagonists are a master and his servant who seem existentially bound to one another, to the lifeless life they live together in their cramped seaside home. Hamm, the master, Beckett later explained, is “a King in a chess-game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves.” The hopelessness of the play marked other gloomy Beckett works, including Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s entire literary career, in fact, is nicely summed up by his proposed ideal chess game—the chess pieces may move around for a while in futility, but in the end are back in their starting positions.

  Beckett’s celebration of futility nicely contrasts with the optimistic energy of Duchamp, one of whose mottos was “yes and chess.” Each artist and intellectual, of course, has his or her own particular temperament. Chess has proven to be a pliable enough tool to help deliver a variety of aesthetic statements. Duchamp’s optimism and Beckett’s pessimism make elegant bookends on a very wide shelf of beautiful problems.

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Moves 20 and 21

  ANDERSSEN WAS AGAIN UNDER attack, and needed to escape check immediately—the ultimate in tempo-losing positions. He had only two choices: moving his King to e2 or moving it to g2.