After Levon Aronian had won the American Cup tournament in St. Louis recently, an old remark by Garry Kasparov was quoted: “The chess world is always happier when Levon Aronian plays well.”
I think so too. Not only because of Aronian’s chess style, rich with original ideas, but also because according to all accounts he is a very amiable man, aggressive at the board and peaceful in ordinary life. In interviews he is outspoken, but there is also a pleasant irony that makes you wonder if he means everything he says.
For example, when in 2011 he explained his aggressive style thus: “I think the thing here is my diet. For 11 years now I haven’t eaten any mammals – although it’s well-known that I’m a person with a bloodthirsty nature. So then, sitting down to play a game and, metaphorically speaking, meeting an animal face-to-face, I experience nostalgia and try to get my fill of blood in those short moments.” Really?
He likes things that I like too. Kafka, Gogol, John Coltrane, Fellini and chocolate with at least 85 percent cocoa. That we had something else in common, he told me at the opening of the 2007 Corus tournament in Wijk aan Zee. It was about the Nose.
When Genna Sosonko had emigrated from Russia to the Netherlands in the early 1970s, he gave Dutch chess players nicknames. Hein Donner was “Big Brother,” after the mythical tyrant from Orwell’s 1984. Hein was shocked, perhaps because in his parental home he had always been little brother. I was “The Nose,” because when lost in thought at the chessboard, I often held one or two fingers to my nose.
Later I wrote in New in Chess about the role of the Nose in Russia and Russian chess life. I followed Vladimir Nabokov, who in his quirky and beautiful book Nikolai Gogol had written about Gogol’s obsession with the Nose, the title of one of Gogol’s stories. According to Nabokov, Gogol was very proud of his nose. Nabokov wrote: “His big sharp nose was of such length and mobility that in the days of his youth he had been able (being something of an amateur contortionist) to bring its tip and his underlip in ghoulish contact; this nose was his keenest and most essential outer part.”
The nose as his most essential outer part, surely a hint that Gogol’s sexual life was not quite satisfactory. Nabokov went on quoting a letter by Gogol to a young lady, in which he wrote that his nose was so sharp and long that it could “penetrate personally without the assistance of fingers into the smallest snuffbox, if of course a chiquenaude did not come to repel the intruder.” A chiquenaude, I found out, is a sudden quick movement of the fingers.
Nabokov found in Gogol’s writings an orgy of smells, sneezes, snorts and sniffles and of dripping and twitching noses. A drunkard tries to saw off a nose and the inhabitants of the moon turn out to be Noses. Nabokov also thought that the obsession with the nose was typically Russian.
I do not feel qualified to judge, but I know that Garry Kasparov held a pair of fingers under his nose in 1997 while explaining that he had “sniffed a whiff of real intelligence” at the chess computer. And countless are the times that Kasparov spoke of his nose as the organ that taught him possibilities that were still imperceptible to the conscious thinking brain.
And Anatoly Karpov once said, “I know Kasparov as well as I know any human being. I know his smell. I can read him that way. I recognize the smell when he is excited, and I know it when he is afraid. We may be enemies, but we are intimate enemies.”
To come back to Aronian and the Nose, at that opening of the Corus tournament in Wijk aan Zee in 2007, Aronian said he liked my articles in New in Chess and especially that about the nose. “Now I know what I owe my success to.” He pointed to his own nose, which was indeed well-endowed.
But in 2014 he had to undergo nose surgery for breathing problems. At that time, he was second in the world, nowadays he is number 26 on the rating list. I couldn’t help wondering if the fact that part of his nose must have been cut away might have something to do with the drop in rating. Should we see him as a modern Samson, who lost his strength when his hair was cut off? But maybe we shouldn’t read too much into it. Many players have lost some of their strength over a ten-year period without nose surgery.
With players like Caruana, So and Dominguez Perez, the American Cup was a strong tournament with $400,000 prize money. Aronian’s first place brought him $90,000. Apart from the Open there was a women’s section that was won by 14-year-old Alice Lee. She earned $40,000.
The format was a double elimination knock-out with a mixture of classical and rapid chess. Please don’t ask me for details, it’s too complicated . The last decisive game in the final between Aronian and Wesley So was a rapid game.
Click here to view So-Aronian, St. Louis 2024