Ghosts and Dreams

It was Children’s Book Week in the Netherlands and because I sometimes hear that I am a child myself, I bought a recent comic strip about Suske and Wiske, De Schakende Schim (The Chessplaying Phantom.)

Suske and Wiske are characters created by the Belgian artist Willy Vandersteen. His albums are translated into many languages and in the English-speaking world Suske and Wiske are known as Spike and Suzy or Luke and Lucy or Willy and Wanda.

The front cover of the albums still have the name Willy Vandersteen on it, although he died more than thirty years ago. In this case it was appropriate, given the ghostly subject matter of my album.

Wiske (the girl) has taken up chess and wants to win an important tournament. She seems on her way to selling her soul in exchange for the chess advice of a ghostly apparition, Mireille Le Blanc, but Suske (he is a boy) saves her.

Mireille turns out to have been murdered fifty years earlier by a chess player who could not stand to lose, and so she searches, driven by hatred, for chess players who cannot bear losing either, to take revenge on them. But in the end, repentance and forgiveness prove more powerful than hate.

At the same time, I was reading a chess novel by the Australian David Lovejoy, White Horses and Dark Knights, published in 2022. The author had sent me the book and it begins with a quote from me. But that very quote, something you say carelessly once in an interview and then come across in all sorts of places, had long stopped me from reading the book.

In 2008, Lovejoy had published a romanticized biography of my chess hero Savielly Tartakower, Moral Victories, based on a quote from Tartakower himself: moral victories don’t count.

His 2022 book is also connected with Tartakower, though not everyone will notice that. The main character is an English chess master who rises to great heights thanks to his muse and mistress, a young Japanese woman who, as a medium for supernatural forces, can heal the sick and give an average chess master the sharpness of top players. Unintentionally, she can also do great harm to persons who stand in the way of her favorite.

At the end, the Englishman plays the most important game of his life, and it is clear from the description of that game that he is guided by the spirit of Tartakower: the moves are those of Maróczy-Tartakower, Teplitz-Schönau 1922.

That was the same game that I published more than a year ago in the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer. I had been let go from my daily newspaper and found a new place at that weekly. In my first column there I paid tribute to Tartakower, who had been the chess columnist of that weekly for some time during the thirties.

Lovejoy and I didn’t copy each other when we gave the same game. Apparently, great lovers of Tartakower think alike.

 I learned from Google that David Lovejoy had passed away this year on October 2, “peacefully and willingly.” I should have complimented him with his book, but I was much too late.

There are many reports in chess literature about supposed interventions from the Beyond, but I’d rather write about dreams. I have dreamed a lot about chess, but it was never anything worth recounting. Other chess players have had more fruitful dreams.

Tim Krabbé tells on his website Chess Curiosities that he once dreamt of the following position: White Kg3 Qc3 Be2, pawns e5 h2, Black Kh6 Qd7 Ng6, pawns g5 h5. Black to move and win.

In the dream Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov and Tim himself could not solve it, but a vague acquaintance of Tim, who was not even a chess player, did it: 1...Qh3+ 2.Kxh3 Nf4+ and then 3...Nxe2+ and 4...Nxc3. When Tim woke up, it took him a while to realize that it was not that vague acquaintance but he himself who had come up with that task and solved it.

In his book from 1994 Chess the Adventurous Way, Jan Timman tells of an important move that had come to him in his sleep. During his candidates match against Artur Jussupow in Linares in 1992, he and his second Jeroen Piket had spent many hours trying to find an improvement on the way he had handled the opening in the second match game, where he had gained an advantage that had not led to a win. Jan and Jeroen’s efforts to find an improvement had come to nothing.

But then, Jan went to bed and when he woke up he knew what he should have done: 21.Bf1!! He didn’t think then that he would still be able to apply that find in the match, but miraculously Jussupow made it happen in the sixth game. Timman won that game with his dream move Bf1, equalizing the match and finally winning 6½-4½ and advancing to the finals against Nigel Short.

In the realm of imagination, not only people and animals, but objects can dream as well. In 1971, the Dutch writer C. Buddingh’ created a piece of art he called Dream of a Draughts Stone. It was purchased shortly thereafter by his friend Gerard Stigter (the writer known as K. Schippers) who, like Buddingh’, was a great chess enthusiast.

Gerard died in 2021. His widow gave me Buddingh’s piece of art and now I see it every day in my study, the starting position of a chess game, with only the white pawn on c2 replaced by a draughts stone whose dream has come true by the company of chessmen.

Click here to view the game Timman-Jussupow, Candidates Semi-final, Linares 1992