It is said that there are as many possible chess games as there are atoms in the universe. This diversity – where chance only counts to decide who will play first, with a slight advantage – undoubtedly partly explains its global distribution. Over the centuries, it has fascinated musicians, writers and filmmakers, but also the world of power, to the point of becoming one of the symbols of the Cold War, then that of the confrontation between man and machine.
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Where and when did the game of chess appear? The oldest written sources allow us to attest that it was known in Persia around the year 600 AD, under the name Chatrang. In the 8th century, a Chinese text makes an indisputable reference to it and another source confirms its presence in Kashmir a century later. Archaeological data finally brings us around the year 700 in the surroundings of Samarkand. The most likely hypothesis to date therefore directs us towards the Sassanid Empire and its areas of influence, 1,500 years ago.
Its diffusion by the Arabs is much better documented. It dates back to the Islamic conquest of Persia and was reflected by the writing of the first treaties at the end of the first millennium. It allowed Europeans to discover it in turn, from Spain or Sicily, before it spread across the entire continent around the 11th century.
We then add dice throws. Like all games of chance, it attracted the wrath of the King of France, Louis IX, who had it banned, in vain, in 1254. The rules evolved and the piece called “vizier” became the “queen”, winning in mobility and becoming the most powerful element of the game. The dice disappear and only the skill of the players can make the difference
Its oriental origins bear witness to the mysterious expression “checkmate”, which could derive from an Arabic expression meaning “the king is dead” or more probably from the Persian “the king is ambushed”, which is more in line with reality of the game. Indeed, the king is the only piece that cannot leave the board, but must be immobilized for the game to be won by the opposing player. For experienced players, the game stops when the prospect of checkmate becomes inevitable.
Failures and revolutions
It was again in Europe that the rules of the modern game stabilized in the middle of the 17th century. A century later, the composer and famous player Philidor wrote one of the first treatises in French. “ Pawns are the soul of chess », he wrote in what was sometimes seen as a brilliant anticipation of the French Revolution and the role that the people would play in it. A supporter of the constitutional monarchy, he nevertheless ended his life in exile in London in 1795.
During the 19th century – undoubtedly linked to the Industrial Revolution and its demands for profitability – the time allotted to players between each move was timed. Whoever overtakes him “falls on the clock” and is eliminated. The Prague player Whilelm Steinitz, the first official world champion in 1886, put an end to the unchallenged reign of the attacking style of play, imbued with romanticism. It gave birth to the “positional school”, which some compare to the defensive game developed in the middle of the 20th century by Italian footballers and known under the name of catenaccio.
Already under the tsars, Russia established itself as a great chess nation, before making this game a real issue of intellectual domination during the Soviet era. The most famous player of his generation, Boris Alekhine, nevertheless left the USSR after narrowly escaping a firing squad. After the Second World War, Soviet hegemony was almost unchallenged. It paradoxically contributes to the fame of Bobby Fischer, the first American who managed to break it in 1972 against the title holder Boris Spassky. This episode is told in the novel by Alessandro Barbaglia, The Madman’s Move (Liana Levi, 2023).
A power game
Other legendary rivalries pit Soviet champion Anatoli Karpov against his former compatriot Viktor Kortchnoï, a refugee in Switzerland, or with Garry Kasparov, a Soviet and then Russian player, also in exile since 2013. The latter also distinguished himself in games played against computer programs. He gave his name to several chess software programs.
Although chess has spread across many cultures, it has often remained, in reality as well as in symbols, associated with power and the dominant classes. In a patriarchal world, they have also long been the prerogative of men, at least officially. A legend has it, for example, that the fiancée of an aristocrat condemned to the guillotine, in masculine attire, challenged and defeated Robespierre at chess, thus obtaining the pardon of her lover.
Closer to home, Hungarian Judit Polgar was the youngest person to become a “chess grandmaster”, beating the record previously held by Bobby Fischer. She subsequently always refused to enter strictly women’s competitions and managed to climb to eighth place in the world.
Failures in cinema and literature
Ugandan Phiona Mutesi, who grew up in a slum, barely went to school when, at the age of nine, she began learning to play chess. Her playing career, which earned her the title of “female master candidate”, also allowed her to return to school and opened the way to higher studies in the United States. In 2016, his story inspired the film The Lady of Katwe.
Chess has largely inspired literature and cinema. Librettist for Giuseppe Verdi, an opera composer in his spare time, the Milanese Arrigo Boito devotes a short story to a game of chess where he highlights his Manichean vision of the world, inherited from Baudelaire. In a Homeric part, a black rebel and a white dandy confront each other in the cozy setting of a luxury hotel in Switzerland. All the violence of the game is represented in this surprising allegory, by a European author in the middle of the colonial era, which makes the black man the intellectual and moral hero of this fight to the death where his rival has only his cynicism on his side. and his cruelty.
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig devoted the last months of his life – before his suicide in February 1942 – to the short novel The chess player, also linked to the history of his time, since it is a question of Nazism and exile. In The Luzhin defense, published in 1930, Vladimir Nabokov was inspired by the life of the German player Curt von Bardeleben. The prize for daring metaphors goes to the series The Wire where one of the young characters explains to two others the rules of the game of chess while weaving constant parallels with the organization of drug trafficking in their neighborhood. It is finally after trying to teach chess to her little cat that Lewis Carroll’s Alice passes on the other side of the mirror.
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