Apollo with Straw Hat
The February issue of the British monthly magazine Chess had an article by Ben Graff about chess poems. It had an epigraph from a poem by the often gloomy poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985),
Continuing to Live
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
So, in poker you can draw new cards, but in chess you are stuck with the choices you have made. That is at odds with a general sentiment among chess players that there is always a second chance. The great Savielly Tartakower wrote: “The winner of the game is the one who made the penultimate mistake.”
Philip Larkin’s classic stanza has been hammered into my brain:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
That poem seems to urge us to get out of life as soon as possible and, in any case, not to have children.
Chess and poetry is an endless subject, from the Persian poet Omar Khayam (1048-1123), who wrote that at the end both the king and the humble pawns are stored in the same box, to Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) who speculated about the endlessness of time and matter and of gods behind the gods: God guides the hand of the chess player who guides the pieces, but which god is behind God, to guide the cosmos?
In the Netherlands, we had Kees Buddingh (1918-1985) as the chess-playing national poet. He wrote a lot about chess. The Belgian chess collector Daniel de Mol quoted from Buddingh’s diary Notes: “He was clearly furious that he lost this game – and because of that, I still think back on it with double pleasure.” And also, regarding another game:
Incidentally, among the great moments in a person’s life are those moments when your opponent on the other side of the board, with a face that may or may not have turned red, takes down his king. I even believe that you actually only play chess for these seconds.
While browsing for chess-playing poets, I came across a remarkable specimen I had never heard of: Lorenzo Mavilis (1860-1912). There are various spellings of his name: Lorentsos for the first name and a b instead of a v in the surname, sometimes two ls; this is because he was Greek and the Greek letters were Latinized with some liberty. As a chess player, he sometimes adopted the name Sillibam so as not to put his parents on his trail, and a hallucinating computer explained that this was his real name, but “upside down.”
Lorenzo Mavilis was born in 1860 in Ithaca, on the island of Odysseus, the man of a thousand ruses.
He went to Germany to study and spent a year in Breslau (the city that is now Polish and called Wroclaw), where he played the game I show at the end.
In Germany, he was celebrated for his great beauty, as evidenced by an Italian book about him, the German translation of which is titled Apoll mit Strohut. Despite his great erudition, as an admirer of Schopenhauer he relativized the German system philosophers. According to a fellow student, he said: “All philosophical systems are intellectual exercises, like a good game of chess. They have nothing to do with truth.” This seems a very modern insight to me.
Back in Greece, he was celebrated as a poet, linguistic prodigy, scholar, politician, and fighter for Greek independence. Monuments have been erected in his honor in various Greek cities.
In 1912, he was killed in the Battle of Driskos between Greek troops and the army of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Mavilis had joined the volunteer army of Ricciotti Garibaldi, a son of the famous revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.
The “Red Shirts” were the name given to the Garibaldini, named after their red shirts, which were originally intended for slaughterhouse workers to mask the blood on their shirts. Because of that striking red, they could easily spot each other in battle, but their opponents could of course do so as well, and perhaps that was indeed the intention of heroic warriors who considered it an honor to die for Greece.
Besides being a strong practical chess player, Mavilis was also a skilled problem composer of “mate in two” and “mate in three” problems. The game below is from a tournament won by Emanuel Lasker, who obtained the Master title here.
In an interesting article on chess.com that acquainted me with Mavilis (https://www.chess.com/blog/introuble2/lorentzos-mavilis-a-poet-a-fighter-a-chess-player) there was mention of a victory by him over “Dr. Lasker.” Could that be the world champion? That would be quite a feat, but it turned out that this win was against Emanuel's brother Berthold, a physician who was a strong chessplayer too. He was the husband of the famous poet Else Lasker-Schüler.
Click here to view Seger-Mavilis, Breslau 1889