A Century of Chess: David Janowski from 1910-1919

As @Flatfish writes in the comments to this blog, “The more I read about this era, the more it seems that David Janowski was somehow the true hero.”

That’s putting it a bit strongly but is consistent with the impression that I’ve gained while working on this series. Jqnowski came to prominence in 1895 and, more than anyone else at that time, achieved a compromise between classical and Romantic chess. Janowski fully understood the value of the “scientific,” Steinitzian setup - there was never an attempt in his games to launch a premature attack with lines like the King’s Gambit or Evans Gambit. But, once having established an architecturally-sound position, he dedicated himself to the attack - or, more precisely, to the initiative.

That was the idea that was nowhere to be found in the classical conception of the game, but that, by the 1950s or ’60s, would dominate high-end chess thinking. And Janowski had all the key ideas: the long-lasting power of the bishops, the rolling attack, the value of an exchange sacrifice. 

Janowski really was one of the very best in the world from 1895 to 1905. He finished third at the super-strong Vienna 1898 tournament, shared second at equally-formidable London 1899, won Monte Carlo 1901 and Hanover 1902, was third at Monte Carlo 1902, shared second at Cambridge Springs 1904 and at Ostend 1905, and then from 1906 onwards his results started to badly deteriorate. The collapse of Janowski’s form seems to have less to do with anything deficient in his style (as his contemporaries often assumed) as with mental problems. He was an immensely difficult person, at some point utterly lost all sense of proportion and danger, and a severe gambling addiction seems to have crossed over into his chess-playing. Frank Marshall, who knew Janowski about as well as anybody did, wrote that, “Janowski can follow a wrong path with more determination than any man I have ever met."  And Lasker noted that Janowski’s habitual failure to finish off winning positions evinced a lack of desire to stop playing a beautiful game. In other words, he was exactly like the sort of roulette junkie who keeps putting down large bets on zero and then, when he wins, can’t bear to leave the table and so re-bets again. 

That side of Janowski explains the drubbing he took from Lasker in their matches in 1909 and 1910, in which Lasker seemed to play him exactly the way a cardsharp would deal with an overeager chump. Meanwhile, there’s another way to see Janowski, which is that, with his elegant bearing, his insistence on beauty, he became a sort of symbol of the old world faced with the mechanized age. 

In a series of games against Capablanca in the 1910s, he comes across very much like the sort of brave cavalry officers who hurled themselves against machine gun nests during World War I. Janowski emphasized beauty and deep conceptions in his chess and seemed, again and again, to underestimate the defensive resources of his opponents. 

It’s hard to think about Janowski and this era to not have a sense of the tragic - of a collapse of a psyche and, really, of a whole way of being. He started the decade utterly convinced that he was the rightful world champion (and his disastrous loss in his 1909 match with Lasker did nothing to dissuade him of that notion). As the decade progressed, though, he broke with his patron, the stylish Olympian, art connoisseur (and forger) Leo Nardus. The outbreak of World War I found him at Mannheim where he was interned as a French national (he had been intemperate enough, while sitting in a German cafe, to have a loud argument in which he prophesied German defeat). He spent two years in internment and then made it to New York in 1916, severely disillusioned, saying that it would take 20 years for European chess to recover, and looking to challenge anyone would play him. Capablanca avoided a match with him and he found himself facing the JV squad of American masters - Showalter, Jaffe, and Chajes - and, to his horror, couldn’t put them away, beating Jaffe by the slenderest of margins in 1916 and losing to Chajes in 1918. 

Everything else in Janowski’s life would have this same aspect - like a parable of the sad fate of the gambler and of the chess bum. 

He finished last at the great New York tournament of 1924, during which he played brilliancy after brilliancy and then failed to finish off the games. He returned to France in 1927 and died in dire poverty.

Sources: All photos are from Edward Winter's 'Janowsky Jottings' page.