Author: David Bronstein and Tom Furstenburg
NIC (2009)
384 pages
$34.95
Reviewed by John Donaldson
The revised and expanded version of the THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE by David Bronstein and Tom Furstenburg is certain to rank near the top of any list of chess books published this decade. The first edition, published in 1995, drew warm reviews for the enthusiastic and personal approach Bronstein used to examine his close to sixty-year career. A career which included a drawn match for the World Championship, victories in two USSR Championships and four gold medals playing for triumphant Soviet Olympiad teams (1952-58).
Among the highlights of the first edition were the inclusion of fifty of Bronstein’s most memorable efforts with high quality annotations and interesting reminiscences and the chapter “40 Combinations with Explanations”. The latter was not your typical diagram accompanied by bare bones solution section on tactics but a series of essays on combinational play. Solutions to each position were accompanied by close to a page of prose explanation breaking down what had transpired step by step.
This revised and expanded edition of THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE, published two years after Bronstein’s passing, has everything in the old edition save a three-page article “40 Recommendations for the Novice” and the beautiful cover illustration by Sammy Rubinstein. It contains a lot of new material including memorials by Bronstein’s widow Tatiana Boleslavskaya, his co-author and friend Tom Fürstenberg, and new articles by the maestro himself including roughly thirty pages on his many battles with computers. The game section, the main part of the book, has three new battles (Bronstein-Keene, Hastings 1975/76, McDonald-Bronstein, Wrexham 1995 and Bronstein-N.Nikolic, Brussels 1996) but perhaps the most significant addition is the many new photographs which accompany this edition. I counted 32 pages and around one hundred photos, documents and caricatures ranging from Bronstein’s earliest years to the end of his life. Among those featured are a who’s who of chess including Fischer, Tal, Spassky, Botvinnik and Kasparov. Many of them are informal portraits – Fischer walking the streets of Buenos Aires in the early 1960s and Tal and Bronstein paying their respects to Dionysus after visiting a factory during the tournament in Miskolc in 1963. Check out Bronstein playfully posing alongside ruins on an excursion during the Teeside 1975 tournament and try imagining Botvinnik doing the same! This has to be one of the most significant visual records of top chess players in the 20th century.
David Bronstein will be remembered for his many contributions to chess – not least the role he played in developing the King’s Indian Defense – but his two high points were likely the drawn match with Botvinnik and authorship of the THE CHESS STRUGGLE IN PRACTICE. The monumental match with Botvinnik, in which Bronstein was so close to becoming World Champion, is covered in THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE but in a curious fashion. None of the games from the match are among the fifty that Bronstein selects for extensive commentary, though a few make it into the section on combinations. Whether he felt they were too well known, not among his best or was just tired of them is unclear. It is left to his widow, Tatiana Boleslavskaya and co-author Tom Furstenburg to explain some of the personal dynamics behind the match.
Turn to the back of an issue of New in Chess and the feature Just Checking. If the player being interviewed grew up culturally Russian the odds are quite good that the answer to their favorite novel is Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA. Ask the same player what their favorite chess book is and Bronstein’s account of the Zurich 1953 Candidates tournament, THE CHESS STRUGGLE IN PRACTICE, is very likely the answer as well. This is pretty amazing for a book over 50 years old which offers very few concrete variations and speaks volumes for the author’s ability to describe with words the action taking place.
What’s odd about this book is that it is not clear who the author is or more accurately what the division of labor was between Bronstein and his collaborator Boris Vainstein who, possibly at his own choosing, was not publicly identified with the book for many years. In an interview with Antonio Gude in the March 1993 issue of Revista Internacional de Ajedrez that was translated into English by Edward Winter (see C.N. 1949 on page 206 of Kings, Commoners and Knaves), Bronstein states: “Most of the nice words and elegant expressions in the book overall are the work of Vainstein, who writes very well … Of course the analysis and technical concepts are mine, as are the views on my rivals, but it may be said that a large part of the text is by Vainstein. Also, it is a book for which I do not have a particular affection because it reminds me of a tournament that was very special in a negative sense. Things happened there that I should like to forget … We shall discuss that another time. I do not wish to be more specific for the moment.”
Regrettably neither edition of THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE touches upon this interview and Vainstein’s role in the writing of THE CHESS STRUGGLE IN PRACTICE. There is an appreciation of Bronstein by Vainstein in which the latter writes of Bronstein writing the book without reference to himself, but the article was reprinted from an article that ran in 64 in 1984, well before the Bronstein interview. One similar collaboration that comes to mind is that between Larry Evans and Bobby Fischer for MY SIXTY MEMORABLE GAMES, but there Evans contribution was spelled out on the cover even if there has been some speculation that he might have helped some with the prose in the annotations. MY SIXTY MEMORABLE GAMES certainly has a lot more concrete analysis in it than THE CHESS STRUGGLE IN PRACTICE. This suggests that Vainstein played a much more active role than Evans. No one is suggesting that Bronstein isn’t responsible for the heart of the book, but Vainstein deserves more credit for his role.
Player and Opening indexes and a complete tournament record round out a first rate work which like all New in Chess books features first-rate production values.
I give an unqualified recommendation of THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE. It belongs in every chessplayer’s library.
Click to buy (or get more information about)
SECRET NOTES (by Bronstein & Voronkov)
ZURICH INTERNATIONAL 1953 - Aka THE CHESS STRUGGLE IN PRACTICE (Bronstein)
BOTVINNIK - BRONSTEIN: MOSCOW 1951 by Bronstein
