Bronstein's regrets

I am not going to apologize for bullfighting. It is a survival of the days of the Roman Colosseum. But it does need some explanation. Bullfighting is not a sport. It was never supposed to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull.  - Hemingway


On that day fifteen years ago when I made my third post to this blog, my mind turned, as it often does, to David Bronstein, the creative man of Soviet chess who in 1951 climbed to the pinnacle, played Stalin's man Botvinnik even, and went home. He was the "loser" of a drawn match for the World Championship.

You have failed succeeded achieved eternal neurosis.

Much has been written about this episode over the years, with Bronstein himself saying different things at different times, before his passing in 2006.  That's not too surprising, says Garry Kasparov..."mid-twentieth century Soviet reality was so complicated that nobody is truly capable of depicting it accurately."

Bronstein has for many years been an idol of mine, for both his creativity and his courage.  But in 2014 a clearer but darker picture of Bronstein began to emerge.  Grandmaster Genna Sosonko, who knew Bronstein well, wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of David Bronstein.  Sosonko portrayed a man who never recovered from the Draw/Loss, and gradually become saddened and embittered about it all:

I don’t understand what is happening. I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I don’t understand anything at all. We’ve all been dragged into this hole. They said that chess is the same as Shakespeare, Velázquez, and Raphael. An art. That’s what they said, right? But what is it in reality? Nobody needs it, nobody. It’s neither good, nor fair – it’s cruel. 

In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a quasi-autobiography written in 1995 with Tom Furstenberg, Bronstein presented himself as having made his peace with the lost championship.  From then on, he confided, he thought of himself as a chess artist who would generously, in a kindly and fraternal way, crush you in your favorite variation of your favorite opening, to honor you.

You think I'm bullshitting you?  I am not bullshitting you.  Here American grandmaster Yasser Seirawan describes (starting at 2:00) a 65 year-old Bronstein doing exactly that to six-time U.S. Champion Walter Browne.




It sounds as if, later on, Bronstein started to realize that he was kidding himself a little bit.  In reality,  his beautiful triumphs were never creative dances with his opponents.  They were brutal affairs.  Chess fans most admire the sudden shock, the wave of destruction, the flash of lightning that destroys the opponent where he stands in as spectacular a way as possible.  It was never Velázquez - it is Manolete, all the way.

R x c5!

When Bronstein scored his amazing victory over Ljubojevic in 1973, the result was a work of art for the ages, but nothing but pain for Ljubojevic.  And maybe it sucked just as much for Ljubojevic - then #3 in the world, and never that high again - as it had for Bronstein that fateful week in Russia, 22 years before.

I didn’t live my life right, not at all. I got it all wrong, everything. I believed in chess, that somebody needed it. It sounds like I’m reciting my own obituary, doesn’t it?

Well, that's just silly.  You were what you were, every day, the whole way.  You can't just go be someone else, David.  You played chess with wounded men in hospitals in World War II, and with politicians and master spies.  It got you a nice apartment and a lot of fans, and works of chess art that will be remembered for as long as the lights are on.  You even got into a movie:

On the board:  Bronstein-Spassky, 1960 ...Bronstein lost

But even a modern career counselor would say - you couldn't have been something else.  You were a chess genius.  You weren't "talented" like Edward Lasker, who decided to focus more on engineering and invented the breast pump.  You weren't a self-made grandmaster like Korchnoi, who in another place and time might have successfully applied his incandescent rage to appliance sales, talk radio, or hedge funds.  Korchnoi knew this.  Sosonko asked him about Bronstein:

He answered with a tirade: "Was Bronstein an outstanding player? He was a genius, what a genius! A genius is somebody ahead of his time, and Bronstein was far ahead of his time. If Botvinnik said that Bronstein was very strong when the opening was making a transition into the middlegame then that was a very weak statement. In reality, at that point in the game, Bronstein demonstrated many ideas that were complete revelations. That's the sign of a genius."

No, David, for you and a few other natural chess geniuses, there never was a Plan B.

I shoulda got into the stock market.

Sosonko had a few regrets as well.  Late in the book he starts to think he has made a mistake:

[A] powerful thought pierced my mind: 'Why did I write all that stuff about this great chess player who suffered so much at the end of his life? Why? What was the point of all that philosophizing and those attempted explanations Who was all that for?' You see, I knew deep down that I shouldn't have tried to recall anything. I should have left the departed alone in their graves and should have allowed the living to keep their illusions.

But what illusion is there?  There is no illusion.  Chess is the coldest, most deterministic game imaginable.  The rules are clear and rigid, there is no element of chance except that which derives from the imperfections - or inspirations - of the players themselves.  When a game is done the moves are there in writing for all time, open to inspection and computer analysis, from now until the end of our species.

The hand that moved the pieces may be dead, but, as Shakespeare understood, the mind - or at least its pattern and particular rhythm in a given moment - endures.  And David Bronstein had a beautiful mind.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice was revised after Bronstein's death and named The Guardian's "Chess Book of the Year" - available here

See also Bill Price's "An Encounter with David Bronstein" here

Leonard Barden's obituary of Bronstein for The Guardian is here