Dutch Treat
by Hans Ree

Revenge and Forgiveness

"Therefore then Reynaud took the chess board and smote Berthelot
upon his head so hard that he cloved him to the teeth. And thus
Berthelot fell down dead to the ground afore him." This is a piece
of medieval chess reporting. And in another story it is told
(contrary to historical truth) how Charlot, son of Charlemagne, was
mated by an opponent who rejoiced in his win in an unseemly
extravagant manner. "And Charlot took the chess-board and said
thus: 'Ha, lecherous bastard, must you talk so much about it?' And
raises the chess-board and gave him such a great blow with it that
he dashed out all his brains and forced his two eyes out of his head,
and he fell dead in the middle of the place."

These quotes I take from the book Chess Pieces by Norman
Knight, a fine anthology of chess-related literary texts. Bones crack
and blood spurts all over the place in medieval chess literature. But
these are not really acts of revenge. The violence is too
spontaneous, too natural. Somebody loses a game, he gets angry
and cleaves his opponent's head. That's the way things were. Like a
lion who guiltlessly slaughters his prey. He does not think of
revenge.

In Murray's A History of Chess there is a tale taken from the 12th
century work De nugis curialium by Walter Map. Murray writes:
"Two Breton nobles had quarreled, and one had mutilated the
other. The King of France patched up the quarrel by marrying the
son and daughter of the two contestants. One day the pair were
playing chess, when the husband was called away. A knight took
his place, and was mated by the lady, who said pointedly, 'Non
tibi, sed orbi filio mat.'"

Murray probably could afford to leave Latin untranslated, but we
cannot. What the lady said was: 'Not to you, but to the son of the
man who is castrated, I give mate.'

Then the story goes on: "When the husband heard of this, he went
straightway and treated his wife's father in the same way that his
father had been treated, and returned home with the members of
which he had deprived his victim. He called for the chess, and
when he won he tumbled them on the board, saying, 'Filiae orbi
dico mat.'" Meaning: I say mate to the daughter of the man who is
castrated. Yes, this glorious act truly deserves the name of revenge.

In modern chess literature the word revenge is often used, but the
examples given are not very spectacular. A player loses a game and
then works for years on an opening novelty with which he avenges
his loss. Wunderkind Reshevsky is treated without respect by
Lasker, fifteen years later the mature Reshevsky wipes Lasker off
the board at Nottingham. Little Jo‰l Lautier was sent out of the
press room by Kasparov in the French town Belfort when he
indicated a mistake in analysis by Kasparov, and later the adult
Lautier gains a positive score against Kasparov. Tarrasch claims
that Yates is too weak to play in the tournament and then Yates
loses against almost everyone but beats Tarrasch.

One could call it revenge, and maybe the people involved felt it
was a kind of revenge, but we certainly do not find impressive
villainy here. The story of the Russian chess trainer Alexander
Nikitin is closer to the real thing, as he describes it himself in his
book Mit Kasparov zum Schachgipfel (With Kasparov to the chess
summit)


In 1976 Nikitin worked for the Sports Committee, the highest
sports authority in the Soviet Union, much higher in rank then the
board of the chess federation. Nikitin had seen a French press
report implying that world champion Karpov was negotiating
privately with Fischer in Tokyo about a match for the world
championship. Nikitin knew that the Sports Committee had not
given permission for these negotiations. He felt it his duty to report
Karpov's serious offense to his superiors.

Of course Nikitin had underestimated Karpov. What he did not
know was that permission for these negotiations had been granted
by an even higher authority, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party.

When Karpov came to hear of Nikitin's denunciation, he demanded
Nikitin to be fired. This happened. Nikitin was accused of
"immoral behaviour toward his prot‚g‚" and demoted to the
humble function of trainer of the club Spartak.

As fate would have it, one of the members of this club was a
promising thirteen-year-old youngster, Garry Kasparov. Nikitin
saw his chance. He swore that he would dethrone the intriguer
Karpov, who had wrecked his career. And he would do it in the
same way as his former "prot‚g‚" had always executed his own
acts of revenge: not by acting himself, but by means of others. For
Nikitin, Kasparov would be the tool to use for his revenge. All this
is Nikitin's way of describing the events, not mine.

For the next few years Nikitin spent all his talent and energy on the
training of Kasparov. In 1985 he reached his goal: Kasparov beat
Karpov.

Thus Nikitin describes Kasparov's way to the top as a nine-year
long campaign of revenge by himself. He is convinced that without
his help, Kasparov would never have become world champion. Not
all of his readers will share this opinion, but nevertheless this is a
story of revenge on the grand scale, in accordance with the old
adage that revenge is a dish that is best eaten cold. Karpov may
have been an appreciative reader of this story, for revenge is a
concept that is quite familiar to him. He wrote a book, Learn from
Your Defeats, which is all about games in which he took revenge
for a recent loss. Some evil-doers have escaped him, because he
never had the opportunity to play them after they had beaten him.
People like Igor Ivanov, who beat Karpov in Russia and then
escaped to Canada. Karpov finishes his book saying: "For them I
will always be ready." 

It is not difficult to find revenge in the chess world, but is there a
beautiful example of forgiveness? Not many that I know of, but
Tartakower comes to mind. In 1946 many top players were in
London for the Victory Tournament. There was much talk about
Alekhine, who had written disgusting anti-Semitic articles during
the war. A players' committee was formed, with Euwe as president,
to deliberate if and how Alekhine should be punished for his
collaboration with the Nazis. Only one grandmaster, Saviely
Tartakower, did not join in the general condemnation of Alekhine.
Tartakower called the behaviour of his colleagues hypocritical. He
said that even before the war everyone had known that Alekhine
was anti-Semitic and that nobody had taken offence. 

Arnold Denker reminisces (The Bobby Fischer I Knew and Other
Stories) that right then and there Tartakower proceeded to take up a
collection for Alekhine, who lived in Portugal with little money. If
this is true, one can imagine that it made quite an impression in
London in 1946, because Tartakower, to put it cynically and
gruesomely, was a man who had a right to speak. When he was
twelve years old, both his parents had been murdered in a pogrom
in Rostov-on-Don. Much later, when World War II broke out,
Tartakower managed at a ripe age to flee from Paris to London,
where he joined the army of DeGaulle's Free French. Tartakower
could plead for Alekhine without anyone thinking that he had some
sympathy for collaboration with the Germans. He could afford to
forgive Alekhine.

But was it true forgiveness? Was it humanly possible to forgive
Alekhine in January 1946? Euwe has described Tartakower as a
man who was averse to joining a crowd and who hated mass
demonstrations. Maybe Tartakower was more annoyed by the easy
unity of his colleagues, than forgiving Alekhine.

And maybe his collection for the pennyless Alekhine can be
understood as a subtle act of revenge, the revenge of a man of
honor. Alekhine had written that there would probably never be a
Jewish world champion again, and now Tartakower signalled a
humiliating message: you wanted us to be killed, but I have
forgiven you.