A Century of Chess: Grigory Levenfish (1920-29)
Gennady Sosonko has — as one would expect from him — a beautiful chapter on Grigory Levenfish in his Russian Silhouettes. Levenfish was the product of the first great wave of Russian chess — a wave that smashed against World War I and then against the Russian Revolution. By the early 1910s, it was clear that Russia was the rising power in chess. Stars of the Russian chess world included not only Alexander Alekhine and Aron Nimzowitsch but also Stefan Levitsky, Alexander Flamberg, Sergei von Freymann, Alexander Selesniev, and Ilya Rabinovich — all of whom would, from the perspective of the chess world, disappear virtually without a trace in the ensuing tumult. The players of this generation who emigrated to the West — Alekhine, Nimzowitsch, Bogoljubow, Tartakower — would be the cream of the international elite into the 1930s. Those who stayed in the USSR are now almost entirely a chess footnote — although many of them had the talent to have competed with the world’s best.
Levenfish was the star of this group and the one who had the longest career, in spite of very difficult living circumstances. There is almost no question that, had he gotten out — or had the Soviet chess machine kicked into gear a few years earlier — that he would have been somewhere in the conversation for the world championship. As Fedor Bohartichuk put it, “He was a pure soul but also a tragic one, a genuine chess martyr.”
It wasn’t just timing that separated Levenfish from his true destiny. He was singularly unequipped to adapt to Soviet life. He was “an aristocrat by spirit and by education,” Sosonko writes, "a highly erudite man who stood out sharply against the conforming masses. [With him] one gains a view of much that seems old-fashioned and is gone forever.” He belonged to an effervescent moment of the pre-war urban intelligentsia — played tennis, enjoyed wine, spoke foreign languages, was highly cosmopolitan in his outlook — and then history abruptly upended his life. "I worked in war factories and sometimes I was left totally without work," he wrote of this period in his memoir. "In 1917, my wife suddenly died. It was not even possible to think about chess." And, after the Revolution, Levenfish found himself like some sort of marooned fish ill-adapted to Soviet life. “He was tall, imposing, bespectacled, watchful and unapproachable in appearance, sarcastic and even acrimonious with almost everyone,” writes Sosonko. “His tennis, his knowledge of foreign languages, his manner of speaking and dressing merely emphasized the difference between him and the new generations.”
That kind of congenital non-conformity could be a death sentence in the USSR, and Levenfish came close to execution. He worked as a chemist specializing in glass and, in the early 1930s, was arrested after a train crash and accused of sabotage. Levenfish had documents to prove that he had warned about this very issue, but his arrest showed him that chemistry, for a state enterprise, wouldn’t be tenable given his temperament and, after a long absence from competitive play, he tried to make a go of it as a professional chess player. “Going into chess meant going into a refuge,” writes Sosonko, but, of course, Levenfish, who was by this time in his 40s, was also out of step with the younger generation of Soviet players. Levenfish wouldn't have the opportunity to travel abroad until the late 1940s. He was the only Soviet grandmaster not to receive a stipend and lived, recalled Yakov Neishtadt, "in great poverty." But, at the same time, it was understood among the chess cognoscenti that Levenfish was the real giant. “Levenfish can play any old way but all the same he understands chess better than we do,” said Alexander Tolush, one of the stars of the younger generation. Viktor Korchnoi recalled that “Botvinnik was a shallow person with a petty sense of humor, in contrast to Levenfish who was an intellectual by blood and by pre-revolutionary education.” And Levenfish proved himself in every one of the few opportunities that were afforded to him. He was the Soviet champion in 1934 and 1937, performed respectably in the international tournaments held in the USSR, and tied a match with Botvinnik in 1937. He was invited to AVRO 1938, which would have cemented his legacy as one of the strongest players of the era, but the Ministry of Sport — always suspicious of him and wishing to have no rivals to Botvinnik — denied him permission. "Contrary to my hopes, I was not sent to that tournament. My condition could be defined as a moral knockout," he wrote. "I gave up my chess career as lost." In later life, he wrote a memoir — hacked up by Soviet censors — and a famous book on rook endgames, which he co-authored with Vassily Smyslov, although, privately, Smyslov insisted that Levenfish had done all the work. Virtually the last glimpse of him was from Boris Spassky, who met Levenfish on the street in 1961 a few days before his death when Levenfish was suffering from a painful operation. "Aged, pale, like an apparition, he was walking holding his head in his hands," Spassky recalled.
Levenfish's Style
1.Tight Turns. Levenfish demonstrated a gift for tactics from an early age and the sense with him is of watching a race car making tight turns in highly-charged combination-rich environments. There’s maybe not that much to analyze here except a sense of chess being primarily a tactical game — and with victory going to the boldest. With Levenfish largely left out of the standard history of Soviet chess, it becomes easy to overlook him as a critical missing link in the development of the Soviet school. Soviet chess, when it fully developed in the ‘40s, seemed to be played up-tempo of anything in the West, and it’s possible to discern Levenfish’s influence there. Chess, in that conception, wasn’t carefully-placed building blocks but rippling dynamism and with attacking positions often produced out of nothing at all.
2.Rook Endgames. Levenfish’s life work was a book on rook endgames that he co-authored with Vassily Smyslov — although, really, Smyslov just checked Levenfish’s analysis. Some of his strength in rook endgames can be seen in his most famous win, a defeat of Emanuel Lasker in 1925.
Levenfish in the Opening
The Sicilian wouldn’t be the powerhouse it was to become until the very end of Levenfish’s career, but Levenfish did some of the trailblazing work in finding the Sicilian’s tactical possibilities. The Levenfish Attack is an aggressive idea for white in the Dragon.
Sources: I am relying mostly on Gennady Sosonko's Russian Silhouettes. Levenfish's memoir, translated as Soviet Outcast, is available here. Chessbase.com has a piece on Levenfish here and simaginfan here.
