Romanovsky reviews Bronstein
This is an excerpt of my [*first draft*] translation of Peter Romanovsky’s review of Bronstein’s Zurich tournament book, translated from the February 1958 issue of Шахматы в СССР. Bronstein’s book is a classic of chess commentary.
The tradition of publishing tournament collections dates back to the first international tournament in London in 1851. The collection of games of this tournament — the first in history — was published by the prominent English chess figure Howard Staunton.
In the beginning the compilations were rather imperfect, for the art of commentary left much to be desired. Over the years, however, the progress of chess and its literature has improved. The quality of commentaries increased more and more: they became more complete and detailed, and analyses more accurate.
Still, usually authors of tournament compilations limit their aspirations to attempts to point out the errors of the players.
Since the 1880s, the commentator’s art has split into two streams: 1. Analysis (Chigorin), based on descriptions of variants, and 2. Positional (Steinitz, Tarrasch, Em. Lasker): the assessment of positions in light of general principles of strategy and tactics.
Though these two directions are often opposed to each other, they gradually drew closer. A remarkable example of a kind of synthesis of both directions can be found in the brilliant commentary of A. Alekhine to the games of the international tournament in New York in 1924.
Based on Alekhine’s comments, the reader could not only understand the course of the struggle in the tournament games, but he learned a lot of useful things for his own improvement.
D. Bronstein’s book “International Grandmaster Tournament” is a collection of the games of the International Candidates Tournament in 1953.
The author has formulated his task as follows:
- Expand the reader’s chess horizons.
- Improve the skill of the reader.
- Create a view (a very clear view! –P.R.) of modern chess creativity.
- To help the reader appreciate, understand and love even more the depth of chess.
Like a skilled teacher, D. Bronstein acts as an ardent promoter of the art of chess.
What commenting methods did Bronstein choose for his work?
These methods can be summarized as follows:
- Don’t overburden the commentary with variants;
- to write the comments as a story about the middlegame: in the author’s opinion, the least-studied and most interesting stage of a chess game;
- in the comments, to subject to a special analysis the typical positions arising from the players’ conflicting plans;
- consider some important strategic concepts, such as the weakness of the black squares, the advantage of two bishops, the relative strength of the pieces, “redundant defense”, etc.;
- touch upon issues of psychology and creative intuition.
The author also paid great attention to opening issues, in particular the Sicilian Defense, the Nimzowitsch Defense and the King’s Indian Defense. He explained modern ideas in these openings, backing up his considerations with meaningful analysis. Delving deeply into the book, we begin to understand what the author means by the story of the middlegame. On almost every page we meet excerpts from this big story in the form of various tournament episodes and psychological excursions.
The book gives the reasonings not only of the author, but also of the participants of the tournament, every now and then appearing on stage with their aspirations and hopes.
And yet, the book truly blossoms with the author’s detailed comments on the drawn games (even grandmasters are not offended), in which the author reveals his creative views, talks about their assessment of positions and plans, their tastes. In this part the author’s commentary is subjective, but maybe that’s why here he is especially interesting.
The sincerity with which the author reveals his chess “self” is captivating. So as readers are initiated into the secrets of D. Bronstein’s creative achievements, they learn the rich creative world of his chess thought.
In many comments the author becomes a teacher and considers a different position, to illuminate its details; he helps the reader understand and master the material and he reinforces important concepts about strategy and tactics.
In the comments, the author touches on a number of general questions: reflections on the role of the first move, about sacrifice, about romanticism, about intuition, etc.
Of course, not everything is indisputable and may be accepted without doubt in the author’s statements and suggestions, but what is valuable is that our leading grandmaster leads a sincere and exciting conversation with the reader about creative problems, about his opinions.
Let’s look at some examples from the book. We’ll begin with some comments that are subjective in character. Here is a position from the game Bronstein–Geller:
