Dutch Treat 
by Hans Ree

Marks or Marx?

In almost every chess magazine of the Soviet Union the slogan
could be found, at one time or another: "Chess is the gymnasium of
the mind - V.I. Lenin." Of course it was a wonderful argument for
the propagation of chess. Who in the former Soviet Union would
dare to contradict Lenin? But last year Genna Sosonko revealed in
New in Chess that the slogan had not actually been invented by
Lenin, but by the Russian chess master and organizer Yakov
Rokhlin, who had attached Lenin's name to it for propaganda
purposes.

That was clever of Rokhlin. One tends to think that it was also a bit
risky. Had it been found out that he had misused the name of Lenin
so opportunistically, trouble would not have been far off. But in
those pre-computer times, Lenin's Collected Works were not yet
available on disk with handy search functions, and nobody was
foolish enough to comb all volumes to see if the quote was really
there.

And it was also a good thing that no one had found out that in
1803, in the English magazine Chess Studies, there had been
written about the game of chess: "It is, in its essential tendency, a
gymnasium of the mind." Not only had Rokhlin used Lenin for his
own purposes, he also had made him look like a plagiarizer.

There should be no doubt though about Lenin's love of chess, nor
about the chess passion of socialist patriarch Karl Marx. After
Marx's death, his comrade in arms Wilhelm Liebknecht described
how furious Marx would be whenever he had lost a chess game.
(W. Liebknecht: Karl Marx zum Gedaechtnis, quoted in Kaissiber,
of which more later.)

In London, where Marx and other political refugees had gathered
around 1850, Marx once announced triumphantly that he had found
a new move with which he would beat everybody, and at first this
proved indeed to be the case. Until Liebknecht found the right
defense and beat Marx with it. Marx asked for revenge, the next
morning at his place.

When Liebknecht arrived there, Marx's wife had retired and
'Lenchen' (I suppose this was the maid) was looking unfriendly.
Marx at once fetched the chessboard. During the night he had
found an improvement. He won the first game and immediately his
spirits improved and he had sandwiches brought and something to
drink. The next game was won by Liebknecht.

They went on till midnight, when Lenchen decided that it had been
enough. Next morning Liebknecht was visited by Lenchen, who
told him that Marx's wife urgently requested him not to play chess
with her husband during the evenings anymore, as Marx was
intolerable when he lost. One game by Marx has been handed
down in chess literature.

White Karl Marx (?)-Black Meyer 1. e2-e4 e7-e5 2. f2-f4 e5xf4 3.
Ng1-f3 g7-g5 4. Bf1-c4 g5-g4 5. 0-0 The Muzio gambit, quite
popular at that time. 5...g4xf3 6. Qd1xf3 Qd8-f6 7. e4-e5 Qf6xe5
8. d2-d3 Bf8-h6 9. Nb1-c3 Ng8-e7 10. Bc1-d2 Nb8-c6 11. Ra1-e1
Qe5-f5 Played for the first time in Kolisch-L. Paulsen, London
1861. 12. Nc3-d5 Ke8-d8 13. Bd2-c3 Successfully tried by
Chigorin in 1874, but in later games 13. Qe2 was preferred.
13...Rh8-g8 14. Bc3-f6 More accurate would have been 14. Rxe7,
as in Mackenzie-N.N. New York 1883. 14...Bh6-g5 15. Bf6xg5
Qf5xg5 16. Nd5xf4 Nc6-e5 After 16...Nd4 17. Qf2 Ne6 White
wouldn't have had enough for his piece. 17. Qf3-e4 d7-d6 18.
h2-h4 Qg5-g4 And here 18...Qg7 was stronger. (See Diagram)

19. Bc4xf7 Rg8-f8 20. Bf7-h5 Qg4-g7 21. d3-d4 Ne5-c6 22. c2-c3
a7-a5 23. Nf4-e6+ Bc8xe6 24. Rf1xf8+ Qg7xf8 25. Qe4xe6
Ra8-a6 26. Re1-f1 Qf8-g7 27. Bh5- g4 Nc6-b8 28. Rf1-f7 Black
resigned.

All in all, a game of which no Marxist should be ashamed. Marx,
unmaterialistically, sacrifices a piece and proves to be well aware
of contemporary opening theory. His play is not without mistakes,
but he handles the attack with flourish.

But was the game really played by Marx?

The German quarterly Kaissiber is a rich source of information for
chess lovers who like to go off the beaten track. The magazine
specializes in analyses of unfashionable opening variations and
historical research.

For instance, in its first issue of 2000 there is an article by Michael
Ehn, Wiener Turnierpreise (tournament prizes in Vienna). It is
about a question that has always intrigued me and many others.
How much did the masters of the past actually earn their living?
We read about prizes of so many pounds, marks, crowns or
whatever, but it is very difficult to form an idea how much that
would be in modern terms. And what did chess writers get for their
work? Ehn makes a start of handling this difficult subject in a
scientific way. Very interesting. But back to Marx now.

In the same issue, in an article called Der Murks mit Marx (The
Trouble with Marx), Kaissiber's editor Stefan Buecker reports on
his investigations as to the authenticity of the game supposedly
played by Marx. His suspicions had been raised by the quality of
the game. Wasn't it just too good for Marx? Liebknecht had written
that Marx was an excellent draught player, but weak at chess. How
then could Marx be so well versed in the theory of the Muzio
Gambit?

Bcker went back to the sources and found that when the game
was published in 1926 in a Russian magazine, the editors had
honestly written that the source was not known to them. But this
was forgotten later.

In Schlechter's 8th edition of Bilguer's Handbuch, the openings
bible of that time, the opening moves of the game were given with
the footnote, (p. 731): "Gentleman's Journal 1871, page 218, notes
that 13...Rf8, as in Marks-Meyer, is better." The 1873 edition of
Bilguer is even more specific and mentions that the player with the
black pieces had been H. Meyer.

This H. Meyer was known to Buecker. He must have been the
problem composer Heinrich Meyer, who moved from Hanover to
London around 1870.

Buecker reaches the conclusion that the player with the white pieces
cannot have been Karl Marx, but must have been Edward Marks or
Mark Marks (whoever they may have been, I personally had never
heard of either of them before). He is probably right, but there still
remain some slight doubts. In his recent biography Karl Marx the
author Francis Wheen writes that Marx played the game in 1867,
when he was in Germany to check the proofs of his main work Das
Kapital, at a houseparty given by the chess master G.R.L.
Neumann.

Wheen obviously is under the impression that he is the first to print
the score of this game, which in fact has appeared in many
magazines and books. This does not improve his credentials as a
chess historian. On the other hand, he is quite specific as to time
and place and there must be some basis to it. I put the matter to
Buecker, who replied that Wheen's reference to the game had only
been indicated to him after his own article had appeared. He had
written to Wheen for clarification, but had not yet received a reply.
Could it have been, Buecker surmised, that Wheen had
misunderstood the Russian 'partya', which means game, and had
changed it to a house 'party' given by Neumann?

Maybe. For the moment we have to wait a bit before we can
definitely do away with Karl Marx's one preserved game of chess.

There is also a game fragment that has been attributed to Marx, but
it had been known for a long time that this attribution was wrong.
(See Diagram)

White: Kg1, Qa4, Rd8,Rf1, Bf8; pawns - a3, b2, g2, h3 Black:
Kh8, Qd2, Ng4, Nh5; pawns - b7, c7, f7, g3, h7

White Neumann-Black Marx (??) Black announced mate in three,
starting with 1...Qd2-f2+. Buecker quotes the Deutsche
Schachzeitung of 1869: "From a game played by G.R. Neumann
(White) with Knight odds against Mark Marks from London."
There he is again, this Mr. Marks. In Cyrillic transcription there is
no difference between him and Marx and it is understandable that
Soviet writers eagerly attributed this game fragment to Marx, until
their mistake was pointed out in 1964 by N. Sacharov in the
Bulletin of the Central Chess Club.

This column first appeared in the Dutch newspaper
"NRC-Handelsblad" on April 1, 2000. Copyright 2000 Hans Ree.
All Rights Reserved. 