A Century of Chess: Alekhine-Levitsky 1913

In 1913, for the first time, it becomes possible to talk about a Capablanca-Alekhine rivalry. By a scheduling quirk, the major Central European tournaments were held in 1912 leaving 1913 a barren chess year. The action shifted east and west - to a group of tournaments organized in the Western Hemisphere, between New York and Havana, where Capablanca dominated, and a series of events centered on St Petersburg where Alekhine was the central figure. The difference between them is obvious. Capablanca’s wins are mostly effortless, but there is nevertheless something superficial about his play - and he proved to be vulnerable against an energetic, tenacious opponent like Marshall or Janowski. Alekhine was emerging as the great young star of Russian chess - he was still only 20 - but his ascent was far from effortless. Take, for instance, the match with Stefan Levitsky, a now-completely forgotten player (he’s remembered if at all for 23...Qg3!! against Marshall the year before) but a talent and a dangerous tactician who had finished ahead of Alekhine at the Vilnius All-Russian tournament in 1912.

Alekhine won the first three games giving rise to thoughts of a blowout, but Levitsky won two, then the players exchanged victories, with Levitsky several times making Alekhine look bad, and it wasn’t until Game 8 that Alekhine began to truly pull ahead, winning the last three games of the match for a four-point margin with all ten games decisive. 

This chess was very different from Capablanca’s - similar to Adolf Anderssen’s play, with fantastic conceptions (as Fischer put it) and both players working hard to generate combinations several moves deep. The match was organized by Nikolay Tereschenko with the condition that all games opened 1. e4 e5 and from there couldn’t venture into either the Ruy Lopez or Four Knights. Unfortunately, the match is goodbye to Stefan Levitsky, who worked as a technician at platinum mines in the Urals and, even before the war, was able only to play very rarely. Dus-Chotimirski remembered him as "a peculiar, whole-hearted, and original Russian man, who should be regarded among the strongest pre-revolutionary Russian masters." 

Sources: batgirl has a really terrific article on Levitsky. Alekhine annotates two of the games of the match in My Best Games of Chess.