His mother left him thirty kopecks for a tram ticket to the Kirov Islands, where there was a park and a chess pavilion with a black Knight on the front. But instead of the black Knight, who could jump over pawns and other pieces, Borya preferred the slender white Queen and her long, sliding moves along open lines and diagonals. He noticed that all the pieces, except for the Queen, had only one type of movement assigned to them. Only the Queen moved in two ways, like a Rook and a Bishop, and the King was like a Queen restricted to one square. If he could, Borya would take the white Queen and carry her in his pocket all day and place her under his pillow at night.
No, Borya would never do that. You can’t play without the Queen, and someone would be harmed, angry, and saddened. He saw how it looked when a piece was missing. In some sets, there were no pawns, Rooks, or Knights. Players replaced the lost pieces with coins, corks, matchboxes. On one chessboard, he saw a lead soldier instead of a Bishop. He heard different names used by the old players in the chess pavilion and remembered the words spoken in the children’s home, where they also played chess. Lady instead of Queen, Runner instead of Bishop, Horse instead of Knight. He also wanted to play chess there, in the village of Korshik in the Kirov region, where they took him from besieged Leningrad together with Zhora.
He remembered it was cold, there was nothing to eat, he was sick and weak, and his dad carried him to the truck. Then he traveled for a long time with Zhora by train in a freight car with a stove inside. He cried in the children’s home, longing for his mom and dad, feeling weak and hungry again, falling ill. Zhora helped him, took care of him. There he saw older boys playing chess for the first time. He asked them to show him how to play. After a long time, when more than a year passed, his mom and dad took them away and went to live together in Sverdlovsk, and that’s when Borya recovered. They returned to Leningrad when the war ended. Iraida was born. Then dad moved out, he had another wife. He visited them, brought bread and clothes, left money.
The kopecks his mother gave him were enough for a round-trip ticket, and Borya could still buy a dumpling and a glass of carbonated water with syrup. That had to last for the whole long day. Borya would only return around ten, eleven, sometimes even later. There were white nights, the sun set at ten in the evening, and it never got completely dark; for a couple of hours, it was like dusk, and the sun rose again at four in the morning. When he got up, his mom wasn’t there; she went to work very early. Borya ate fried potatoes from the previous night, porridge, and dark bread for breakfast. Then he went to the tram stop. His older brother Zhora stayed with Ira. It was over ten kilometers from Eighth Soviet Street, where the four of them lived in one room of an apartment shared with other tenants, to the Kirov Islands, and Borya was always afraid he wouldn’t squeeze into the tram.
The tram number twelve was crowded, and he stood on the step together with others, holding onto the railing. He didn’t have shoes, and he had to be careful that people didn’t trample on his bare feet. His worst enemy were soldier boots. Getting stepped on by such a boot hurt the most; Borya couldn’t help but scream.
In the chess pavilion, there were tables, and people played chess. When the weather was good, the players set up tables outside. There was a pond nearby, and frogs croaked while birds chirped in the trees. The island was surrounded by the Neva River.
He went there the whole summer. During the first few weeks, he only watched, but when they organized a competition for boys, he signed up. In the first game, barefoot Borya quickly got checkmated. He cried and ran away.
But he came back the next day and saw something that enchanted him. A man with dark, curly hair and a tanned face appeared. He had big, black, round eyes. His eyes were almost half-covered by eyelids and looked contemplative and distant. Borya had seen eyes like that in icons and in illustrated fairy tale books. This wizard from a fairy tale world did something magical; he played against all at once and won.
On that day, Borya was returning home on the last tram, his stomach even emptier than usual. The tram was fully packed, there wasn’t even space on the steps. He only had the sausage left.
The sausage was the twisted brake sleeve outside, at the back of the tram, and that’s where Borya settled himself. If the tram went straight, everything was fine, but it was worse on the turns. It swayed, and you had to hold on tightly. But how could he hold on properly when, halfway through the journey, a drunkard squeezed in next to him. That man was up to all sorts of antics. He was thrown from one side to the other, grabbing onto whatever he could, with his left or right hand. He pushed and jostled Borya unintentionally, his legs bent and spread apart under him, almost slipping several times. But he didn’t fall. Borya was afraid that the drunkard would eventually push him off the sausage. It was one thing to get hurt, but another thing entirely to have to walk the rest of the way on foot.
“Damn you!”
The drunkard fell off. Not on a turn, but when the tram was going straight. He was like a soldier who went through a long combat trail, fought in the toughest battles, charged into the assault in the front line, and then got hit by a stray bullet when he was returning home with his trophies.
Borya returned home with something priceless. With his first love, with a sense of happiness and the intensity of life that a newly born affection brings, the kind of affection that gives rise to a life-long passion.
In autumn, he couldn’t go to the Islands anymore, and he wandered the city like a hungry dog in search of a chess shelter.
His mother took him to the Pioneers Palace. On that occasion, Zhora lent him his shoes. His mother could barely walk; her back was in pain. She worked at potato digging, and something happened to her when she lifted a heavy sack. For lunch, they had potato peel soup and dark bread.
In reception, they directed them where they needed to go and told them to ask for Vladimir Grigoryevich, but Zak, because there was another Vladimir Grigoryevich.
Borya recognized the wizard from the Kirov Islands.
“Vladimir Grigoryevich, I would be grateful if you took the boy. Besides chess, he doesn’t see anything in the world.”
Vladimir Zak looked at Borya. Oversized, tattered shoes, patched trousers, a threadbare shirt, a worn-out jacket.
“It’s tough at home, and there’s no father. I have to work, so let Borya sit here under the roof, in warmth, and play chess. He won’t let me live.”
“We’ll see, I make no promises. We have no more spots, ma’am...?”
“Yekaterina Petrovna. Take my Borya, Vladimir Grigoryevich.”
Borya looked fascinated at the hall where there were tables with chess sets, and boys played blitz games. He heard the fast clicks of the chess clock levers and the clatter of the pieces on the boards, sounding like gunfire. Triumphant shouts and groans of disappointment resounded constantly.
“Yekaterina Petrovna, let’s go and talk. How old are you?” the chess wizard addressed Borya.
“Nine.”
“Go to that room,” Vladimir Zak pointed to the door. “Vitya is giving a simul there. He plays well. Let him check you.”
Zak went to the reception with Borya’s mom, and Borya sat down at the last table in the room where the simul began. The older boy who was giving it looked at little Borya.
“I’ll play this bungler blindfolded,” he said, and everyone laughed.
This time, Borya didn’t allow himself to be checkmated so quickly, but he still lost.
“And what do you think?” Zak asked.
“He can hardly play,” replied fifteen-year-old Vitya Korchnoi, who had recently won the Junior Championship of Leningrad.
“He’ll learn.”
Viktor Korchnoi laughed and went to find a partner for blitz. He liked his coach, Vladimir Grigoryevich. He was fourteen years old when Zak took care of him. Korchnoi was already playing quite well at that time; he had learned a lot on his own from old textbooks by Lasker, Tartakower, and Romanovsky, which he found at second-hand bookshops. Zak showed him how to analyze his own games, how to find mistakes and good moves in them. He taught him to play the open variation of the Spanish Opening and the Grünfeld Defense. He shared his analyses with him. Zak encouraged Vitya to play different systems, to search independently for things that suited him best.
Korchnoi’s father was killed on the front line, and Zak replaced him in many ways. Viktor visited Zak’s home, he knew his wife and daughters. He observed his manners, his way of being and acting. Zak always took off his hat when bowing to someone. He learned the old manners from Loewenfisch.
Wulf Zak was born in Berdychiv a year before the outbreak of the First World War. In the 1920s, his family moved to Leningrad, and little Wulf became Volodya. His father, Grigory Moiseyevich Zak, a bookkeeper by profession, died during the siege of Leningrad at the end of 1941, and his mother passed away even before the war. Zak went to the front as a volunteer and served in communications units. At that time, he joined the Communist Party. He received a medal for his combat merits and for the defense of Leningrad.
The siege of the city lasted for nine hundred days. Over a million people died, two hundred thousand from German bombs and artillery, four times as many from hunger and cold. The survivors were too weak to bury the dead and they slipped into the graves. There were cases of cannibalism; people ate the bodies of the deceased, with children’s meat being particularly in demand for its tenderness. Even long after the war, those who survived couldn’t enjoy eating meat-filled dumplings bought on the street. Korchnoi survived the siege because so many of his relatives had died, leaving food ration cards behind. His mother worked in a sugar refinery and brought home sweet molasses.
Even during the blockade, the chess life in Leningrad did not come to a halt. Abram Model, a chess master, pianist, and mathematician, organized city championships. Chess players came to the games straight from their front-line positions and returned to the front after playing their games. In late 1943, Model organized a chess tournament for juniors at the Pioneers Palace. Hungry children from different districts of the city came on foot because of the lack of transportation, wanting to play and win, and they cried when they lost.
When Zak returned to Leningrad after demobilization, he saw destroyed suburbs, trees cut down for firewood, and dismantled wooden houses. Fresh graves were everywhere. It was difficult to find a building without a wound or scar, just as it was difficult to find a person without an injury or scar, whether on the body or on the soul.
Boris Spassky came to the Pioneers Palace on Nevsky Prospekt every day. The chess club was located in the former walnut study of Tsar Alexander III in the Anichkov Palace, previously occupied by Prince Potemkin, a lover of Catherine the Great. An enormous, brightly shining crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. On the wall, there was a painting depicting Lenin playing chess on the island of Capri, while the writer Gorky observed the game.
Vladimir Zak taught Boris the basics of strategy and tactics, showed him openings and endgames. He lent Boris books to study on his own, and for hours, Boris sat in the kitchen with a dimly lit lamp over the chessboard. During the training sessions, Zak set up pawns and pieces on the board and asked Boris to evaluate the position. Boris looked and said that the white pieces were in a better position. According to Boris, the white pieces had to be better because they had the Queen, his favorite piece, while the black pieces did not. Zak was not satisfied.
“Stand up, Boris, so that everyone can see you,” he said loudly. “Boris is almost ten years old, and he can’t evaluate positions. Where do the white pieces stand better? Look closely. How many times can the white Queen defend the pawn?”
“Once.”
“And how many times can the two black Rooks attack the pawn?”
“Twice.”
“So how will you save it? The Queen is stronger than the Rooks when there are weaknesses in different places because the Queen can attack them all at once. When there is only one weakness, two Rooks are better, both in defense and in attack. Do you understand?”
Zak taught Boris to play the King’s Gambit. Through Steinitz’s games, he made it clear to him that one should not be afraid of losing castling rights, that the King can be active in the middlegame, not just in the endgame.
“When you have an advantage in the center and better developed pieces, your opponent cannot do anything to your King. His King will always be more vulnerable, even if he hides behind castling.”
One day, Zak gave Boris a strange puzzle to solve. It was a composition created by Aleksander Petrov, the strongest Russian chess player of the first half of the nineteenth century. Petrov was a state councilor, a high-ranking official in the Tsar’s administration in Warsaw, and the author of the first Russian chess textbook. He was the first to analyze an opening that later became known as the Russian Defense or Petrov’s Defense. The composition had a very long name: “Napoleon’s Escape from Moscow to Paris, where the White Tsar gives him checkmate,” but it wasn’t difficult. The task was to checkmate the black King in fourteen moves. Petrov described his composition as follows: “The white pieces represent the Russian army. The black King is Napoleon. Square a1, where Napoleon stands, is Moscow, and square h8, where he gets checkmated, is Paris. The cavalry is chasing the defeated Napoleon.”
Boris quickly found the solution. Two white Knights forced the black King from square a1 to square h8 with checks, and then the white King made a discovered check, which checkmated the black King.
“But there’s a shorter mate!” Boris exclaimed. “Six moves, not fourteen.”
Zak smiled.
“That’s what you think?”
“On the sixth move, instead of checking with the Knight, you can checkmate immediately with the Queen on a8.”
“That’s correct. And now I’ll read you what Petrov wrote about it: The Queen should have blocked Napoleon’s path with a move to a8, then he wouldn’t have escaped to Paris, and it would have been check and mate to him.” Zak guessed it was about the Battle of Berezina, but he wasn’t sure.