02.05.2005
Alexander Nikitin on books
What are your favorite chess books? Did your preferences change over the years?
In the beginning my favorite book was the Lasker's Manual of Chess. Later the book of Bronstein “International tournament of grandmasters” took its place, I think, maybe it is the best chess book at all. Not declining my devotion to Bronstein, I would also like to underscore the multivolume work of Garry Kasparov. I take part in the creation of this book as a malicious opponent which is always trying to contradict the author’s opinion.
Do you work distantly or meet each other from time to time?
Why should we work by correspondence? We are living nearby. The discussion arises about all the games. First of all I scrutinize the games by myself, then we meet and debates hoarse (but it never comes to blows). Usually Garry prevails; however, sometimes my objections are sustained. In any case as a result of these discussions we manage to spare a lot of imperfections. My participation has started from the Volume Three. Now I am studying the games of Anatoly Karpov, we should deliver the next volume to the publishers already this summer. When we are working, sometimes we reach such depth that neither we nor previous annotators could even suspect. Surely, our purpose does not consist in refuting the previous annotations, but in giving a new look on the widely known games...
Do you make a distinction between 'interesting' and 'useful' books?
Nowadays theamount of chess books is large. I think, one could even not publish 50% of them, but probably the reason is the excessive energy of the authors or some other factors. If we talk about useful books – the methodical value of the books of Dvoretsky is beyond any doubt. The excellent series was created by Alexander Khalifman. He seems to have decided to beat us by the number of volumes ("Opening for White according to Anand')... Unfortunately, the publication of such books looks ratehr meaningless at present time, because the young players for whom these books are written prefer to use "Fritz" and study games in the "Megabase". As to my mind therein lies a reason of the fact that while we have more complete knowledge of the opening, the quality of play on the whole declines. The number of blunders has increased, the endgame technique has noticeably declined, and the positional understanding became worse... One cannot consider the time trouble due to a rapid control as a justification, because sometimes one makes such mistakes that the complete lack of understanding becomes evident.
Why the tournament collections are not so popular nowadays? What genre of books is more popular now?
The majority of published chess books has a practical value – problem books, combination collections and so on. The authors lure the parents of young players promising that the level of their children will increase incredibly when they accomplish all given examples. However, it is only a waste of time. Virtually no one writes the textbooks, because one cannot create something better than Lasker and Capablanca already did. It is difficult to modernize them, they were written for always, and even now one should learn to understand chess reading such kind of books.
And writing of such a good tournament collection as "The candidates tournament 1953" requires time and is not recompensed materially. If you do care about your work, to focus only on the writing you should stop playing active chess for a while; and the royalties for the publication do not compensate the loss. That is why this kind of books is not popular now.
Besides, in the games of every tournament one can find a lot of mistakes that were hidden for readers before, because the positions were evaluated only "by a quick look", and now we have an opportunity to get considerably deeper using computer. If Bronstein had armed himself with computer and had carefully read his book, he would have done anew probably the half of his verbal annotations – the games were not always going in the way described in the book. For the 3rd volume with Garry we have evaluated the encounters Geller-Euwe and Kotov-Gligoric and we have seriously frayed our nerves each trying to make out his case... Just compare the analyses of these games in the books of Kasparov and of Bronstein, than you will understand what I mean.
Everyone says that chess is changing. Does the chess literature change as well?
I even do not know what to say. Let me ask, how chess is changing in particular?
It is reputed that chess becomes more concrete, the players are trying to avoid the general evaluations...
So the annotations are going to be more concrete as well. I also would like to say something about the quality. The games become more concrete, however, a human brain is not a match of a silicone one in a calculation, one still does a lot of mistakes during the games. Now we have a more perfect mechanism to reveal these errors, and the use of computer in the analysis of the encounters undoubtedly influences the quality of the chess literature.
Which chess books could be interesting for people that do not play chess, in your opinion? Which ones could recruit new players?
Perhaps laymen can read Gik’s books, but they bear very remote relation to chess. Nevertheless I prefer to read chess books or that do not concern chess, but are also very good. Curiosuly, Garry and me independently came across the idea of writing books dedicated to chess that would be addressed to public that does not play chess.
Do you mean the book of Kasparov "How life imitates chess"? Do you know how the work on this project is going along?
As I know, this book exists mostly as an idea. The work has started, but Garry has undertaken so many commitments nowadays... Fortunately, he left professional chess, and unfortunately he has some political affairs. I do not really approve this occupation; however, Garry is an enthusiastic man, now politics is interesting to him. For him it is hard to write a book also because it is absolutely original, requires non-standard habits of thinking and a special selection of chess material – predominantly illustrative...
And what are you going to do?
For the moment it is a secret. However, the idea is at the stage of its completed maturing. Its realization is prevented by the fact that I am so busy with the work on the multivolume Kasparov’s book. I do not teach now. I only meet Dmitry Jakovenko once a week, but it rather looks like a friendly encounter than like a real training. Now my principal work is related to the chess literature.
Questions were asked by Misha Savinov.
This article is published with permission of Association of Chess Professionals
