Mirroring the wider culture of the time
By Surinder Malhi

THE pen — or so runs the cliche — is mightier than the sword. And yet, the most martial of board games, has, down the centuries, inspired countless classics. Chess is, and always has been the game of the writers. Its pared down caricature of human reality has provided a wealth of material for literary allusions, descriptions and metaphors.

The earliest works on chess were in Arabic, as the game flourished at the courts of the caliphs of Baghdad. Among the earliest writers on the game was the Jewish scholar Abraham Ben Ezra, whose most memorable work was Song of Chess written sometime in the 12th century.

The first European book on chess to achieve widespread circulations was Jacapo da Cessole’s De Ludo Scacharum. The Dominican treated friar the chess pieces as excuses for allegorical sermons on morality and courtly manners. The English translation of the book was among the first to be published by Caxton in 1474.

In the late 15th and 16th centuries, the first important theoreticians of the game emerged in Italy and Spain, Lucena, Vicent, Darmiano and Ruy Lopez, to be followed by Greco in the early 17th century. Philidor in the 18th century moved the centre of literature on chess to France where it remained until British champion Howard Staunton wrote his Chess Players’ Hand Book in 1847.

This tradition was further strengthened by the first world champion, William Steinitz, who wrote his epoch-making Modern Chess Instructor in English, in the latter part of the 19th century. However, towards the end of that same period, German became the most important language for chess, thanks to Seigbet Tarasch’s classics Three Hundred Games of Chess and The Games of Chess.

Since 1945, Russian became the prime language for the chess addict, perhaps because of the number of brilliant players emerging from behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain.

While the Arabian Nights and Through The Looking Glass stand for the lighter, more playful literary offshoots of chess, great writers have, from time immemorial, been seized, with a passion for playing the game that has, in turn stoked their creativity.

Turgeneve and Leo Tolstoy are both known to have played ardently, on occasion with each other. In fact, the story is told of how Tolstoy, during his days the army got so deeply engrossed in a game that he forgot to report for duty. As a consequence, not only did he have to forfeit the medal for bravery that had been promised to him, but also endure the ignominy of arrest.

Even this did not cure Tolstoy of his obsession. He whiled away many a lull during the Crimean War (1855-56) with a game.

It was also during the same period that he wrote Savastapol Sketches, so important in the germination of the seminal War And Peace. This classic is widely regarded as a direct offshoot of his obsession.

As a matter of fact, Tolstoy scholars see the mental struggle on the 64 squares as a discipline that helped the author impose order on the messier reality of war. An epic novel demands the marshalling of a vast amount of material. Chess helped Tolstoy to sharpen his own strategic sense.

It could, in fact, be no accident that Vikram Seth — whose A Suitable Boy is constrtucted on the same grand lines as Tolstoy’s novels — is an ardent chess fan.

Besides, Tolstoy, Russian writers Fyodar Dostoyevsky, Mayaksky and Vladimir Nabokov have all been chess fanatics. Indeed, the game has inspired some of the darkly powerful literary studies in obsession. Nabokov’s The Defence is one example, Stefan Zeweig’s novella The Royal game with its sinister premonitions of the author’s own suicide is another.

In a similar vein, authors like Edger Allan Poe, Arthur Canon Doyle and Agatha Christie frequently compare the art of detection to a game of chess.

To be more specific, chess has always appealed to lovers of the demonaic. Thus, Nobel Laureate Elias Cannetti’s only full-length novel, Auto da Fe, revolves arond a chess playing midget who attaches himself to the protagonist and seeks to manipulate him-needless to add, Cannetti himself was an addict of game.

Following this trend, chess continues to make its appearance in contemporary novels. Thus, Maureen Duffy’s Occam Razar castes two elderly chess-playing partners as the heroes, who use their skills at the game to outwit a combination of the IRA and the Mafia. Zim Pear’s In Place of Fallen Leaves, again, has a chess prodigy as one of the main characters.

In addition to its frequent appearance in mainstream literature (and celluloid, incidentally — the Indian master Satyajit Ray, for one, built one of his memorable movies Shatranj Ke Khilari, around two obsessive addicts of the game), chess has spawned a large literature of its own.

Thus in 1912, the definitive History of Chess, written by H.J.R. Murray (son of the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary) estimated that some 5,000 books, magazines, newspapers and columns had already been devoted to the game. Eighty years later, German grandmaster Lothar Schmid was to boast of a 15,000 volume collection purely devoted to chess.

Presently, chess books tend to be impenetrable works on openings, middle games, closings. And that is probably why, for the aesthete, the nineteenth and twentieth centureis are emerging as the golden age of chess books. Whatever the period, though, one gets the feeling that, perhaps old Father Jacopo was right; chess is indeed a mirror of the wider culture of the time.