By Ted Kleine
Chow has lost to Gurevich over a dozen times, most recently at last month’s Mid-America Class Championships in the Ramada Hotel O’Hare. At first Chow dreaded him, because the grand master was winning all the tournaments in town. But lately he’s learned to think of the defeats as free lessons. Gurevich, he realizes, has an insuperable advantage over any American: he was born in the USSR, which turned out grand masters the way inner-city playgrounds turn out NBA all-stars.
“I got too excited, immediately,” Gurevich says. “If I played against anyone else, I would have won. But he had beaten me before, so I start making mistakes. I am afraid not to win the game.”
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When he returned to Chicago, Gurevich turned on his laptop and wrote “Desolate Star,” a Montaigne-style essay. “This story is an honest attempt to find out the reasons for failure,” it began. After replaying the game for several pages, Gurevich concluded by telling the story of Rouget de Lisle, his favorite figure from Stefan Zweig’s book Star Moments of Mankind. De Lisle was a French soldier who led an utterly mediocre life except for one night. On the evening of April 24, 1792, he wrote “La Marsellaise,” which became the French national anthem.
Gurevich’s chess career has been far from mediocre. At 26, he was a grand master. He once beat Garry Kasparov at speed chess, and he has served as a training partner to Victor Korchnoi, one of Russia’s greatest champions. His “ferocity” on the board has been praised by New York Times chess columnist Robert Byrne. In 1996, when Gurevich won the U.S. Masters Open, the Chess Life correspondent called his undefeated run “one of the most dominant performances in American chess since the days of Bobby Fischer.” Quoting Shakespeare, the writer declared that Gurevich bestrode the narrow world of chess “like a colossus.” But he is still searching for his star moment.
Chess was brought to Russia in the 17th century by Czar Alexei Mihailovich, who insisted that his nobles learn the game to show they were cultivated. Today’s elite–the doctors, professors, and scientists–consider its mastery a mark of intellectual distinction. Over five million Russians have a formal chess rating. The game’s near-infinite combinations, complex as life itself, apparently satisfied an aspect of the national character that wants to attain the “high,” or abstract, truth. When Gurevich was born, in 1956, chess had another function: it was a way to prove the USSR’s cultural superiority to the materialistic boobs in America. Russians followed chess as maniacally as Americans followed baseball. The evening news showed highlights of important matches, the newspapers were filled with chess pages and chess puzzles, the national chess magazine 64 sold millions of copies each week.
“Fischer was a very romantic kind of figure because he win all his matches 6-0, and he was a foreigner, he was coming up and disappearing,” Gurevich says. “It was very antisocial behavior in the Soviet Union. People like him very much because he was a very antiestablishment person. In Russia, people wouldn’t be allowed to do things like that. If Fischer was born in Russia, he wouldn’t be allowed to become world champion. They would put him away. That’s what fascinated us, that it was possible to behave like that and survive.”
