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Table of Contents

Foreword by Andy Soltis

Signs and Symbols

Publisher’s Note

A Word about the Authors

Prologue

Chapter 1: Life and Destiny

Childhood and Adolescence

Family

Personality

The First World War

In Gardin’s Film Studio

Investigator, 1920-21

Dissertation

Circumnavigation (1932-33)

Curiosities

England

Germany

Spain

Portugal

Russia

The United States and Canada

Switzerland

France

Inevitable Parallel

Chapter 2: Matches, Tournaments, Rivals

Tournaments

Matches

Bardeleben-Alekhine match, 1908

Nenarokov, Vladimir

Nenarokov-Alekhine Match, 1908

Blumenfeld, Beniamin

All-Russia Amateur Tournament, 1909

Carlsbad Tournaments, 1911, 1923

Znosko-Borovsky, Evgeny

Stockholm Tournament, 1912

Consultation Games

Levitzky, Stepan

Levitzky-Alekhine Match, 1913

Scheveningen Tournament, 1913

Evenson, Alexander

All-Russia Masters Tournament, 1913-1914

St. Petersburg Tournament, 1914

Mannheim Tournament, 1914

Blindfold Chess

Moscow Tournaments, 1915, 1918, 1919-20

Verlinsky, Boris

All-Russia Chess Olympiad, 1920

Budapest Tournament, 1921

Grigoriev, Nikolai

Grigoriev-Alekhine Match, 1921

Teichmann, Richard

Teichmann-Alekhine Match, 1921

The Hague Tournament, 1921

Bernstein, Ossip

Bernstein-Alekhine Matches, 1922, 1933

Piestany Tournament, 1922

London Tournaments, 1922, 1932

Hastings tournaments, 1922, 1925-26, 1933-34, 1936-37

Margate Tournaments, 1923, 1937, 1938

Fine, Reuben

Portsmouth Tournament, 1923

New York Tournaments, 1924, 1927

Baden-Baden Tournament, 1925

Paris Tournaments, 1925, 1933

Dresden Tournament, 1926

Euwe, Max

Euwe-Alekhine Match, 1926-1927

Nimzowitsch, Aron

Semmering-Baden tournament, 1926

World Championship Matches

Capablanca, José Raúl

Capablanca-Alekhine, 1927

Bogoljubow, Efim

Alekhine-Bogoljubow, 1929

Alekhine-Bogoljubow, 1934

Alekhine-Euwe, 1935

Euwe-Alekhine, 1937

Kecskemet Tournament, 1927

San Remo Tournament, 1930

Tournaments of Nations

Bled Tournament, 1931

Correspondence Chess

Flohr, Salo

Berne Tournament, 1932

Podebrady Tournament, 1936

Zürich Tournament, 1934

Nottingham Tournament, 1936

AVRO Tournament, 1938

Munich Tournaments, 1941, 1942

Madrid Tournaments, 1941, 1945

Salzburg Tournaments, 1942, 1943

Junge, Klaus

Prague Tournaments, 1942, 1943

Simultaneous Exhibitions

Chapter 3: Chess Creations – Games and Discoveries

Attack

Aphorisms and Thoughts on Chess

Opening Discoveries

Defense

Celebrities

Combinations

Composition

Middlegame

Neo-romanticism and Alekhine

Style of Play

Alekhine’s Pupil

The Endgame

Aesthetics

Chapter 4: Author and Journalist

Journalist

Author

Tournament Books

My Best Games

Chapter 5: Impervious to Time

Epilogue

World Champions about Alekhine

Literature on Alekhine

Memorials

Planet “Alekhine”

White Snow of Russia

Significant Dates

Tournament Record

Match Record

Opening Index

Player Index

Foreword

“War hero” isn’t a phrase you expect to use in describing a chess grandmaster. Neither is “crime scene investigator.”

Or “firing squad candidate.” Or “scoundrel.”

But all of these could be applied to that most complex of world champions, Alexander Alekhine.

So much has been written about the fourth world champion – and so much of it is fanciful, if not wrong. There have been various accounts of how Alekhine got out of German internment at the start of World War I, of whether he faced a firing squad during the Russian Revolution, and how he eventually fled his homeland, never to return. Reuben Fine, for example, said it was Alekhine’s fluency in foreign languages that allowed him “to attach himself to a delegation sent abroad.” Actually, he got out after marrying his second wife, a Swiss journalist who was 13 years older than he, and left her and their son not long after they settled in Paris.

This book clears up some of the mysteries of Alekhine and provides some wonderful details. To name a few:

He had to give up chess for three youthful years because of encephalitis.
As a boy he was nicknamed “the quiet one.”
He was a Red Cross volunteer during the Great War. He was twice wounded and, indeed, was a hero, who received battlefield medals and awards.
He tried to become a Russian movie actor.
When that failed he served as a criminal investigator whose job it was to study the scene of a crime and analyze it.
He was absent-minded and superstitious, being particularly fond of the number 13.
He nearly killed himself by falling asleep while smoking in bed.
Six of his teeth had to be removed during the 1927 world championship match.
He met the popular author S. S. Van Dine in New York and planned to accept the role of playing a chess master in a movie based on one of Van Dine’s detective stories.
He was 46 when he joined the French army, as an interpreter, at the start of World War II, and he was over 50 when he survived scarlet fever.
He composed his first problem without sight of the board.
He attended Carlsbad 1929 to report on it for the New York Times.
And there’s a planet named for him.

There are so many intriguing aspects to Alekhine’s life that it’s easy to forget how much he dominated the chess world. His career scores against the older generation is impressive: Six wins, seven draws, no losses against Frank Marshall; seven wins, five draws, no losses with Géza Maróczy; Siegbert Tarrasch and Akiba Rubinstein did only slightly better against him.

But against contemporaries Alekhine was also deadly – nine wins, three losses and nine draws with Aron Nimzovich. Salo Flohr managed five losses and seven draws in their games. And Paul Keres – who was reaching his peak while Alekhine was well past his when they played – lost five times and won once out of 14 games.

The Linders capture quite well the drama of Alekhine’s world championship matches with José Capablanca and Max Euwe. Even the blowouts against Efim Bogoljubow are well described. Alekhine was the most peripatetic of champions, and this book details many of his travels on simul tours.

As usual with the Linders’ books, we get a welcome series of mini-biographies of the champion’s contemporaries. In this case, they are Euwe, Capablanca, and Bogoljubow, as well as Fine, Nimzovich, Ossip Bernstein, Flohr, Beniamin Blumenfeld, Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky, Boris Verlinsky, Nikolai Grigoriev, Stepan Levitzky, and the unfortunate Alexander Evenson, among others. This book is more enjoyable than the original from which it was excerpted because of the addition of the excellent game annotations.

The authors refrain from value judgments. A lot could be said about Alekhine’s double-dealing with his world championship match challengers, his shameful treatment of Capablanca, and his participation in tournaments in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Linders stick to the facts. There are certainly enough amazing ones about Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine to go around.

Andy Soltis
New York
January 2013

Signs and Symbols

1-0	White wins
0-1	Black wins
½-½	Draw agreed
+	check
#	mate
!	a strong move
!!	a brilliant/unobvious move
?	a weak move, an error
??	a grave error
!?	a move worth consideration
=	an equal position
	White stands slightly better
	White has a clear advantage
+–	White has a winning position
	Black stands slightly better
	Black has a clear advantage
–+	Black has a winning position
(D)	see the next diagram

Publisher’s Note

This book originally appeared in Russian, part of the massive historical tome published in 2001, Korolyi Shakhmatnovo Mira (Kings of the Chess World). By the time we had the pleasure of meeting with Isaak Linder and his son Vladimir in Moscow in March 2008, the original single-volume work of almost one thousand triple-column, small-font, large-format pages had been split into individual books, one for each world champion. We quickly reached an agreement with the Linders to bring out these books in what would become in English The World Chess Champion Series.

The first in the series was about José Raúl Capablanca, the great Cuban world champion; the book on Lasker was the second in the series.

With the permission and encouragement of the authors, we made some changes to the original Russian edition. The original contained a fine selection of Alekhine’s games. We brought in German grandmaster Karsten Müller to provide refreshing new notes to these classic games. Finally, we created indexes of the players, games and openings, and included more complete information in the headers of each game and game fragment.

There is a tendency for modern-day chessplayers either to ignore or fail to appreciate the great masters of the past. We hope this series helps to change that.

A Word about the Authors

The creative union of the Linders, father and son, came about in the late 1980s, when together they created a trilogy about three world champions, Capablanca, Lasker, and Alekhine (in that order) as part of the Geniuses of Chess series by the Sportverlag publishing house of Berlin (1988-1992). Since that time, their “trophy wall” has grown to include a number of other co-authored projects. There is the unusual documentary/artistic book, The Two Lives of Grandmaster Alatortsev (1994), and also the creation of a popular chess encyclopedia, printed both in Germany (1996) and in Russia (2003), as well as the fundamental work Korolyi Shakhmatnovo Mira [Kings of the Chess World], published by Bolshaya Rossyiskaya Entsiklopedia and Terra-Sport (2001).

I can boldly state that the formation of this union took place right before my eyes, for I have known the senior Linder, Isaak Maksovich, for nearly 70 years! We began playing together in the Young Pioneers’ Stadium in the mid-30s. I met Volodya when we prepared the Chess encyclopedia for the BCE, which would be 20 years ago.

At the authors’ request, I have edited a few of their recent voluminous works, and I must admit to being bowled over by the breadth of their conceptions! Very few people would be capable of taking such large swaths of chess history and recasting them into such an unusual literary form. How have they been able to put their ideas into concrete form?! Above all, because they have a system for dividing up the work. The elder takes charge of the historical approach, and the analytical duties; the son handles the literary decorations and the statistical basis of their works. As a reader, I can say that the results are a delectation for chess gourmets.

Shortcomings? Well, you know the old saying: The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything. This new series of books by Isaak and Vladimir, The World Chess Champion Series, is a reworked, corrected and filled-out edition of Kings of the Chess World, broken up into 14 separate volumes, from Steinitz to Kramnik. It is a panoramic, epic-length mural of the chess struggle on the topmost level from the end of the 19th through the beginning of the 21st centuries.

Yuri Averbakh
Moscow
April 2010

Prologue

Among the greatest players of all time, Alexander Alekhine stands out because of the magnitude of his creative heritage and the aesthetic attractiveness of his games. From 1908 to his last years, he participated in 94 tournaments, winning 64 and finishing second in 12. He played 26 matches, including five world championship matches, and was the only champion in chess history who died while still wearing the crown.

He influenced the chess life of dozens of countries and peoples owing to his brilliant performances in tournaments, matches, exhibition tours, as well as his literary works. Thinking about the most important tendencies in his creative work, we have come to the conclusion that the greatness of his chess lies primarily not in his combinative talent, as is universally contended, but in deeply penetrating the strategic secrets of a position’s struggle, resulting in the apotheosis of Alekhine’s combinations that the world admires.

Admittedly, Alexander Alekhine developed as a chessplayer in the best traditions of the Russian Chess School, assimilating many of his predecessor’s, Mikhail Chigorin, sound principles. But, the phenomenon of Alekhine lies in the fact that he also naturally imbibed everything that was new (and sometimes truly revolutionary) in the contemporary chess milieu. Specifically, he was tremendously influenced by Emanuel Lasker. Alekhine, seven years after becoming world champion, admitted that “[w]ithout him, I could never have become what I have become.” Only with this approach to the study of his creative heritage can one understand how he succeeded in synthesizing the scientific and artistic treatments of the game, thus raising his style to an universal one, and in systemically preparing for competitions, which enabled him to defeat the other incomparable geniuses and triumphantly ascend chess Olympus. The epic struggle of his match with Capablanca and the sudden reversals of situations in their “correspondence match” that lasted many years, as well as the story of his two duels with Bogoljubow and the other two with Euwe, constitute full-blooded, drama-saturated pages of the struggle for the world championship. Without their knowledge and objective coverage, one cannot understand the regularities governing the more than one-hundred-year long history of rivalry at the top nor its modern stage of development.

Alekhine’s activities directed toward raising the ancient game to the level of high art, his rivalry with the other outstanding masters of the game in the struggle for the world championship proceeded under the conditions of a highly complex (and acute in its collisions) societal process. The two world wars, the October Revolution, and the other political repercussions were a heavy trial for Alekhine – with his unusually complicated and contradictory personality.

Endowed with enormous will power and strength of character, Alekhine was able, under these exceptionally difficult conditions, to achieve ever new sporting successes, including the highest of them, winning the title of world chess champion. Today, there are also a number of issues in the theory and practice of chess art, which, in solving, we check against Alekhine for the truth of chess positions and views. Chessplayers are attracted by his credo expressed in his aphoristic saying: “For me, chess is not a game, but an art. Yes, I regard chess as an art and accept all obligations which it imposes on its followers.” His predecessors, Lasker and Capablanca, made statements in the same spirit. Subsequently, his great successors have repeatedly stressed their commitment to chess as an art.

There are several lines of research in chess in which the authoritative views and practice of the first four world champions are very helpful, namely, correspondence play, blindfold play, and issues of work in chess literature. Alekhine was an outstanding chess writer, analyst, and annotator. His books of his best games of 1908-1923 and 1924-1937, as well as the international tournaments in New York (1924 and 1927) and Nottingham (1936) “should be closely studied by everyone who is seriously interested in chess art” (Mikhail Botvinnik).

The most important thing in the creative heritage of a great master is his games. The depth of strategy and the brilliance of combinative ideas represent the eternal value of the chess genius Alexander Alekhine.

Isaak Linder
Vladimir Linder
Moscow 2012