Russian Silhouettes

"Yes, there are two, Russian Silhouettes and The Reliable Past . They are basically a series. Sosonko was a Russian grandmaster and he emigrated, in 1972, to Holland. As someone who has left it behind, he gives extraordinarily deep, poignant, moving and personal accounts of the great chess players that he knew, people like Bronstein, Tal, Korchnoi, who really were part of a historical era. He probably wouldn’t see it as Soviet, exactly. Sosonko is also, I think, Jewish. Let me give you an example. In Russian Silhouettes , he talks about a player called [Mikhail] Tal who was a Latvian Jew. Tal became world champion in 1960. He was an extraordinary talent, a very unusual man, and perhaps the most daring attacking player of all time. He was tremendously popular with chess fans, not just because he was young, but because he had an enormous, dazzling flair. It was very hard to tell how much was calculation and how much was bluff or psychology, but Tal really used to bamboozle very strong players. He was a reaction against the Soviet school, in a sense. It didn’t seem very scientific, because he relied on a fabulous instinct. Kasparov said about him that he was unique in that he didn’t calculate variations, he just saw them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also conformed – and Sosonko is very funny about this – to the view of chess players as somehow from another world. He writes that Tal was “totally indifferent to any form of technology. It goes without saying that he never entertained any thoughts of learning to drive, he never learned to shave.” He also never wore a watch. Sosonko quotes Tal saying: “What’s that? You’ve got something ticking on your arm!” Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic and a drug addict. He damaged himself by drinking and then his liver and kidneys began to malfunction, and the pain relief required the use of morphine. I remember seeing Tal, not long before his death at the age of 55. He looked about 90. He was an extreme character. It’s more about the players. It’s about the extraordinary intellectual culture of these brilliant young men, who somehow focused on this game. He talks about Tal’s death and how he was buried in a Jewish cemetery near the graves of his relatives. He writes: “I asked myself, where do these boys from decent European Jewish families, Modigliani, Kafka, Tal, who are even similar in appearance, get their all-absorbing passion for self-expression from? What is the secret here? I don’t know.” So he doesn’t come up with a theory, but he does give a sense of the passion that they have. Sosonko says that he is writing, in part, because players are dying or have died. He says that each time, after one of them passed away, he wanted to read about them. “Later, I realised that what I wanted to read about them was what I myself knew, which is why I’ve written this book.” It’s a very good way of putting it. The book is translated from the Russian, but he writes beautifully, better than any other person who has written about the chess of the modern era. An attractive aspect of these two books is that although Sosonko was a very strong player and a grandmaster, they contain no moves at all. There are no games in them. They are purely biographical sketches. So anyone who doesn’t play chess but is interested in learning about the people who play chess – particularly in that period – can develop a very deep understanding of what it was about, the personality, the emotion and the character. There are also wonderful photographs from Sosonko’s private collection."