The Legacy of Arlindo Vieira--Part One
In my first two blog posts, I examined two specific areas in which Portuguese chess collector, history teacher, and photographer Arlindo Vieira has contributed to our knowledge and appreciation of Soviet Chess sets: the four types of sets he described as "Grandmaster Sets"; and the three sets he labeled "Utopia," sets he longed to add to his collection.
In this post, we will examine his 2012 YouTube video, which has profoundly shaped the course of Soviet chess collecting. In my next post, I will conclude our review of his legacy. My goal in undertaking this extended review is to establish a base line of knowledge from which I and others have proceeded in our collection, study, and enjoyment of Soviet chess pieces.
Simply titled “Russian-Soviet Chess Pieces,” the nearly twenty-seven-minute YouTube video presents Vieira’s “beloved collection” of Soviet chess pieces in a sophisticated and visually appealing slide show overlaid with a soundtrack of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and other Russian music. I commend it to your viewing.
Vieira divides his presentation into ten sections. Eight of the sections exhibit individual chess sets. Two sections exhibit groups of sets. One group comprises four sets he collectively calls “Grandmaster” sets. The second, the subject of the concluding section, includes photos of "Utopia" chessmen he longed to acquire. We already have examined these sets and will not do so here.
Vieira supplemented his video in a series of nine articles posted in his chess blog, Xadrez Memoria, elaborating his views on the sets of his video, and on the collection of Soviet chess pieces. Each blog post relating to Russian or Soviet sets corresponds to a specific section of his video. I will supplement my review of his video with observations taken from his blog posts. Throughout both video and blog, Arlindo's beautifully staged photos and flamboyant prose, his careful choreography and well-chosen score, and his charisma and passion draw us like a magnet to Soviet and Russian chessmen.
St. Petersburg 1914 Chessmen?
Set to the haunting refrains of the famous Russian ballad Zhuravli, or The Cranes, which ponders whether a flight of cranes overhead are the surviving souls of soldiers lost at war, Vieira opens with a pre-revolutionary set of particular significance. It is a heavily battle-scarred black- and natural-colored set of pieces he tells us are very similar in style to those used in the famous St. Petersburg tournament of 1914. We now describe pieces of this style to be “Karelian Birch” pieces, referring to the wood from which they are made.
In Xadrez Memoria, Vieira describes how he acquired the set:
I passed by them as a ‘dog in a harvested vineyard.’ I realized that they were Russian or Soviet, I caught a glimpse of their poor condition, and went on to the next image at Ebay's chess auctions. After an hour I returned and decided to do a closer study of the pieces, because some strange reason made me not forget them. Bad state yes sir. But, an original 'patina,' an antiquity that did not deceive even by the excellent pictures that the seller of St. Petersburg put in the auction. ‘Very old,’ he said, but he didn't venture how much. The bidding price was very low, around 30 dollars and there were two days to go. Nobody had bid so far, and I was sure that nobody would bid. For the state of the set, and for the fact that Russian –Soviet chess pieces are not part of the favors, the madness, the almost monetary ‘orgasms’ of the collectors of Jaques of London, British Chess Company, among others. I will say that they are poor relatives of international chess collecting, apart from one or the other rare case. That has no value, for the design, for the wood, for the conventional catalogs of the 'sharks' of the very 'British' collection.
Now fascinated by the old, battle-damaged pieces, he pressed the Russian dealer on their age. Although the dealer would not "guarantee the antiquity" of the set with certainty, his experience told him that the pieces were from the 1930s or 1940s. They exhibited a rich patina, they had suffered much damage over time, and their design was "so different" from characteristic Soviet pieces from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
That night, Vieira found it difficult to sleep. Visions of these pieces bearing the patina of antiquity filled his dreams. He began to think he had seen them before, but where? He rose from his bed and began to research his chess library for photographic evidence of their identity. Then, Eureka!
I removed two books: 'Bernstein's Schach - Umd Lebens Laufbahn' by Savielly G. Tartakower - from Tschaturanga - Olms, and 'Akiba Rubinstein - Uncrowned King' by Donaldson and Minev from International Chess Enterprises. On their covers, confirmation. Both Bernstein and Rubinstein pose for the photo, with pieces, if not the same, at least very similar to those that were at auction. These photos are clearly from the 1st decade of the 20th century. Would they therefore be even older chess pieces, that is, from the 1st-2nd decade of the 20th century? That they were terribly used, lacerated, tired by so much fighting on the board, it was clear, or at least I wanted to believe it was. I am sure, I had: this model of pieces was the most common, at least in St. Petersburg before the Sovietization of chess.
This passage is significant not only for describing how Vieira established the likely identity of the pieces he sought to buy from St. Petersburg, but because they reflect his general methodology of scouring the photographic record to identify chess pieces. Furthermore, they presage the method of exposition he will employ throughout the video, juxtaposing photographs of his pieces with those of like pieces in actual play, usually with famous masters. These photos establish the identity and historical context of the sets. This is of particular importance because the types of evidence we have come to expect to establish a set’s provenance are by and large lacking in a land that endured two World Wars, three revolutions, a civil war, a Great Purge, massive population relocations and mass starvation in the intervening time. It is a method that collectors of Soviet and Russian sets continue to employ. To establish the identity and age of this set in his video, Vieira exhibits photos of Rubenstein, Bernstein, the young Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker, Marshall, and Tarrasch playing with these chessmen, or seated next to them, all establishing their historical provenance and import.
Convinced of the set’s identity, Vieira placed his bid the next day, hopeful he would face no competition for this “dog in the vineyard.” He won, then awaited the set’s arrival. Finally, the postal service delivered it:
[T]he strongest emotion [I] felt when looking at some chess pieces. Even more beautiful than in the photos. The color, the incredible smell of worn varnish and stubble, a ‘patina’ of original time and not of ‘fresh paint,’ and above all the ailments of long board fights, to later rest for long years at someone else's home, or attic of a St. Petersburg club.
Now Vieira faced the question posed to anyone acquiring an old set. Should it be restored? Or should it continue to bear the scars of its life, which give testament to past battles, past victories, and past defeats?
[Whether] to restore them? So, every time I looked at them, I saw an intense life in those flaws, in that worn varnish, board life, of joys, disappointments, of moves played with the anger of despair of defeat, or joy of victory, and I was going to restore them, for him. to inflate artificial life, to make them cute, to enhance them in the market? Their value, I had already internally attributed it to my passion as a collector.
Throughout his video and blog, Vieira presents many sets in his collection. Many of them are in good condition. Not one of them has been restored.
Some Elements of Soviet Design
In the second section of his video, Vieira introduces us to what he describes as a “Soviet Portable Chessboard” with pieces he judges to be "nothing special." Although we now know the set to be Bulgarian in origin, Vieira's observations of Soviet tendencies are worth noting: "stylized design," kings without crosses, and opposite-colored finials that are the "brand image" of Eastern Bloc pieces, and board squares too small to adequately accommodate the pieces. “I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of both Soviet players and tournaments,” he writes, “and, with the exception of the USSR Championships, in its final stage, it is extraordinary to see how the pieces do not seem to breathe on the boards, that is, they seem tight, close together, almost occupying every house they are in, giving poor general visibility.” “Perhaps,” he speculates, “the enormous massification of chess, the need to manufacture millions and millions of sets, required savings.”
Plastic Olympic Chessmen
Vieira describes his next set as “Unusual Plastic/Metal Chess Pieces” that he acquired from a friend who knew only that they were Soviet. His video tells us little about the pieces, other than they were made in Minsk in 1984, according to a page from a Christies catalog he displays. In Xadrez Memoria, he describes them as “quite different” from traditional Soviet pieces, “almost say, aristocratic in their design.” Vieira was fascinated with their “Flowery… somewhat complex and turned shapes.” He tells us that his research determined that the pieces had been offered to certain personalities and sold to the public in commemoration of the 1980 Olympic games held in the USSR. In the video, he shows the set depicted on the cover of a chess book, from which in his blog he concludes the pieces had gained “some popularity.”
Borodino Factory Pieces
Vieira's fourth section showcases “traditional” chessmen from the Borodino factory. Although he shares many beautiful slides of this rather simple and crude set, he tells us nothing more about it in either his video or his blog. We can glean from his introductory photo, however, that his knowledge of the pieces’ origins arises from the colorful cardboard box that houses it.
Vieira next presents “Medium Chess Sets,” which he describes as “very popular in schools and clubs.” In fact, we now recognize them as smaller versions of what he later describes as “Grandmaster 1” pieces, which we examined in an earlier blog post.
"Soviet Championship" Set of the '50s & '60s
The next three sections are the real meat of Vieira's video. The first of these he describes as the set of “Soviet Championships 50-60.” Photos of the set from his collection are interspersed with photos of chess book covers and of many famous masters: Damsky, Botvinnik, Flohr, Petrosian, Tal, Korchnoi, Fischer, Boleslavsky, Taimanov, Kalman, Spassky, and Bronstein. We now know that the set depicted in most of these photos is a different, but similar set we now refer to as the Botvinnik-Flohr II set, which will be the topic of a forthcoming post.
In his blog, Vieira relates that the eBay seller of his pieces had described them as "German." Vieira, however "quickly realized" through the seller's photos that the pieces in fact were "very common Soviet pieces" from the 1950s and 1960s. The shapes of the kings and queens, the large knights and pawns, the "slender style of the pieces" and their "elegance on the board" reminded him of the pieces he had seen in photos of Soviet events of those years in his "archive of interesting chess photos." "A self-respecting 'collector' of chess pieces must be an archeologist of chess photographs," he advises. "It is through them that you can often find the missing pieces in your collection, identify a Staunton, or other type of pieces, or even approximate the set you own."
The board that accompanied his pieces afforded him the opportunity to repeat his concern that the Soviets generally played on boards too small for the pieces. He complains that the small size of the board's squares piles the pieces “on top of one another,” that they “lose their freedom,” and become “asphyxiated,” thereby “making the visibility confusing.”
"Latvian" Chess Pieces
“I called this set ‘Latvian’!” exudes Vieira at the outset of his next section, “So popular in the country of Tal, Vitolins, and so on!” The pieces are tall, slender, and simple: thin stems rising from wide bases and perpendicular pedestals, upon which rest unadorned crowns without connectors or collars, and topped with opposite-colored royal finials. Both the bishop’s miter and the king’s finial echo the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches. The knight is a simple slab, seemingly cut with a band saw and without any elaborate carving details. Netflix viewers might identify the pieces as the same style used in the Moscow Tournament climax to Queen’s Gambit.
Vieira refrains from concluding that these pieces reflect any kind of regional style, but observes that they have appeared in “dozens and dozens of pictures related to Latvian schools, tournaments, and players” and, at least at the time he wrote, 2012, most of the sellers offering them for sale on internet auction sites were from Latvia.
Vieira’s “Latvian” designation has stuck until recently. Most contemporary collectors of Soviet sets today would identify the pieces as “Latvian,” notwithstanding that over the course of six decades they apparently were manufactured from the Leningrad and Moscow regions to Mordovia. However, artist-collector Alan Power and others have begun to call the pieces “Mordovian-Latvian,” or simply “Mordovian,” reflecting our growing understanding of where the pieces were manufactured.
The Grandmaster Pieces
To the tune of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, Vieira introduces the meatiest chapter of his video, “The GM Pieces—Four Versions/Styles.” We have already examined these pieces here.
Contemporary Russian Pieces
The final set Vieira presents from his collection is one he describes as “the only set that is manufactured in Russia” today. In fact, Kadun, and perhaps others, were producing sets in Russia at the 2012 date of the video. He assesses the set as “Not bad… but little gracious and very clumsy.” In his view, it “works on a 6 cm. chessboard.” Most of the photos he shares portray his personal set and its pieces, but he does include several shots of the set being used in tournament play, as well as one of Korchnoi and Sveshnikov playing with it.
"Utopia"
The final chapter of Vieira’s video reprises the children’s choir singing the poignant lines of Zhuravli with which he opened his work. His subject here is sets that are not part of his collection, “but I dream about them.” We have examined these pieces here.
In our next post, we will conclude our review of Arlindo Vieia's contribution to our understanding of Soviet chess sets with an assessment of his legacy.
