10.02.2007
K.E.TALVIK TURNS 100 TODAY!
Emmanuel Stepanovich (Emmanuel Karl Georg) Schiffers (1850-1904), the second rated Russian player of 19th century is Saint Petersburg born and bred. Being of German origin and the citizen of Prussia until 1882 he made a great contribution to the development of chess in Russia – as a player, as M.Chigorin’s teacher, as the first chess lector and as an excellent chess journalist and writer.
Schiffers had a great lot of brothers and sisters but only one nephew, the son of the younger sister Josephina, Johannes Eduard (later Eduard Ivanovich) Talvik inherited his uncle’s passion for chess.
Josephina’s husband Johannes had Estonian roots. He worked as a manager of the San-Galli factories. When the First World War began he was imprisoned as the factories owned by Germans produced the shells to fight against Germany.
The fate of E.I.Talvik (1881-1943?) was dramatic. As an educated musician he served in the Finnish regiment of Life Guards in 1915-1917. It was enough for him to be arrested after the revolution and sentenced to be shot but he managed to run away.
Hard time led E.Talvik to Caucasia where he was brought to tribunal again this time in the Red Army. After escaping and getting demobilized he taught music in the Kutaisi technical school. Later on he moved to Tbilisi where he became the chess champion of the city. But the war against Germany began and Eduard Talvik like other people of German blood was banished to the Turkmenian town of Chardzhou where he finally disappeared without a trace.
Kira Eduardiovna Talvik had the sister Dagmar and the brother Eduard, the latter was a gifted musician. Chess has played a deadly role in his fate. Eduard Eduardovich played in correspondence chess tournaments. When he was arrested in 1938 as a German spy he was charged with crime of giving secret information to the enemies by sending the moves. The sentence “10 years without the right of correspondence” meant immediate death by shooting. E.E.Talvik was 33 years old.
Like her father and brother Kira Eduardovna devoted her life to music. She was a music teacher and later on she became the director of a musical school in Pushkinskie Gory.
K.E.Talvik’s daughter Tatiana Igorevna Pruzhinina will be 75 years old in April. She is well-known in our city as a player and an arbiter. In the beginning of 1990s one of the pupils at the chess lessons in the School No.463 in the Afanasiev St. was the current Champion of Russia Grandmaster Evgeny Alekseev.
A.Kentler
