Alban Berg

Today’s post represents something of a departure for this blog.  Unlike the music I have featured previously, the Piano Sonata by Alban Berg is not a piece I love.  In fact, it is music that I’m still hoping someday to enjoy.

I believe wholeheartedly that we owe it to ourselves to listen to new music.  How many times have we come to appreciate a piece of music only over time, music which at first failed to move us?  To give just two examples from my own experience, when I first heard Samuel Barber’s monumental piano sonata, or Scriabin’s epic Sonata No. 5, their language was foreign to me.  I wouldn’t have thought it possible that they would ever become personal favorites, but they did.  We need to learn not always to trust our first impressions, and to give new and unfamiliar music – music which may not invite a second hearing – a second and even a third chance before allowing ourselves to form an opinion.  Some music simply requires more time.

I say this as much as a reminder to myself as to you, dear reader.  Although my musical tastes run from Bach to Barber, I have never counted any music by Berg, Webern, or Schoenberg (with the sole exception of Verklärte Nacht) among my favorites.  Their music has always felt alien to me; I didn’t understand it, and it didn’t resonate with me emotionally.  Today I see my lack of appreciation for their music as a personal failing, the result of a gaping hole in my music education.  This post is an attempt to begin to fill that hole.  If I needed additional encouragement to listen to this sonata, surely the fact that it has been championed by such eminent pianists as Alfred Brendel, Glenn Gould, and Marc-Andre Hamelin, to name just three, would be reason enough.

The following notes are reprinted from the website of the International Music Score Library Project (http://imslp.org).  The complete score of this sonata is also available at IMSLP, one of the internet’s most valuable resources for classical musicians and music lovers.

The early sonata sketches of Berg while being a student under Schoenberg eventually culminated in this sonata; while considered to be his “graduating composition”, it is one of the most formidable initial works ever written by any composer (Lauder, 1986).

This sonata consists of a single movement centered in the key of B minor, but Berg makes frequent use of chromaticism, whole-tone scales, and wandering key centers, giving the tonality a very unstable feel. The piece is in the typical sonata form, with an Exposition, Development and Recapitulation, but the composition also relies heavily on Arnold Schoenberg’s idea of developing variation, a method to ensure the unity of a piece of music by deriving all aspects of a composition from a single idea.

Schoenberg stated that the unity of a piece is dependent on all aspects of the composition being derived from a single basic idea. Berg would then pass this idea down to one of his students, Theodor Adorno, who in turn stated: “The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different.”  The Sonata is a striking example of the execution of this idea — the whole composition can be derived from the opening quartal gesture and from the opening leitmotif.

As regular readers of this blog may remember, I posted reviews of the first two books in Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” series late last year.  Frugal to a fault, I’ve been waiting to write a review of the third book until it came out in paperback.  My wait came to an unexpected and happy end on Christmas, when I received a Kindle Touch from my wife and an Amazon.com gift card from my older son and daughter-in-law.  Here then is my long-delayed review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

The third installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series begins where the second one ends.  Lisbeth Salander has been shot by Zalachenko, and is airlifted to Sahlgrenska Hospital in Göteborg with bullet wounds in her head, hip, and shoulder.  The surgery to save her life is successful, but her recovery is a lengthy one.

The reader spends much of Salander’s convalescence happily anticipating her trial, but before we get there, we must wend our way through several subplots.  One concerns The Section, an ultra-secret branch of Swedish Internal Security, and a group within The Section charged with handling the defector Zalachenko.  Another involves Erika Berger’s move to Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Svenska Morgon-Posten, and a determined stalker she encounters there.

As interesting as these subplots are, I found myself growing impatient to get back to Salander’s story.  I began to wish – as I had during The Girl Who Played with Fire – that Larsson had engaged the services of a judicious editor.  Before he actually gets back to Salander, however, I realized that hers is not the only story here.  Larsson wants to tell us about Blomqvist too, obviously, as well as Berger, Annika Giannini, Monica Figuerola, Susanne Linder, and others.  I get the feeling that once he set his characters in motion, he had no choice but to run after them as fast as he could, writing down everything they say and do.  Perhaps the breadth of Larsson’s story stems from his background as a journalist, which required him to report everything with minimal editing.  It’s all important to Larsson, and ultimately, to us too.

In any case, Larsson structures events in such a way as to create a suspense that is positively palpable, and a climax that is exceptionally satisfying.  The loose ends of the story – the tangled strands of the plots and subplots – are all masterfully resolved.

I am generally not a reader of popular fiction – there are still so many classics that I have yet to read – but I have made a three-fold exception in the case of the Millennium trilogy.  Why does Millennium matter?  First, I can’t help but admire Larsson’s ability to bring his characters to life.  They are, in a word, unforgettable, and I want to know them better and to share my enthusiasm for them with others, though given the enormous popularity of the series, my contribution in this area is hardly necessary.

Foremost among his creations is of course Lisbeth Salander.  As Blomqvist says, Lisbeth is “…certainly unique, and she’s the most antisocial person I’ve ever known.”  Although true, this is not the whole story.  Observing Lisbeth’s growth is one of the most rewarding aspects of the trilogy.  The line that reveals it best is something Lisbeth says to Annika Giannini: “I…I’m not good at relationships.  But I do trust you.”  This is a defining moment for Lisbeth, and certainly not something she would have said at the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Second, Millenium matters because of Larsson’s realism.  His characters and plots all have an unmistakable ring of truth to them.  Not only do we enjoy his series, we can learn from it.

Finally, Millenium matters because of the relevance of its themes, the most important of which is the hatred that some men – many men – feel toward women.  As Blomkvist himself says, “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.”  Lisbeth Salander becomes a heroic figure because of her uncompromising fight against this hatred, and her ultimate triumph over it.

As important as this theme is, however, we should keep in mind that Larsson’s view of men is primarily a positive one.  For every man in this trilogy who hates women, there are at least two who treat them with love and respect.

There is one more significant theme.  Larsson was a career journalist and investigative reporter, and well aware that governments are likely to confuse what is right with what is merely self-serving.  They are more than capable of lying to their citizenry, and engaging in massive cover-ups and disinformation campaigns.  As citizens, we need to be aware of this, and strive to distinguish the lies from the truth.  The difficulty, of course, lies in knowing whom to believe.  News outlets are all biased to some degree.  The news they choose to report and the way they report it are all influenced by that bias.  We ourselves are biased too, no matter how strenuously we might deny it.  What we see and hear is inevitably filtered through our biases.  Would we know the truth if we heard it?  How can we be sure?

At one point, the question is put to Blomkvist: “How is it possible that civil servants in the Swedish government will go so far as to commit murder?”  He responds, “The only reasonable explanation I can give is that over the years the Section developed into a cult in the true sense of the word.  They became like Knutby, or the pastor Jim Jones, or something like that.  They write their own laws, within which concepts like right and wrong have ceased to be relevant.  And through these laws they imagine themselves isolated from normal society.”

There are times, Larsson is saying, when it pays to be paranoid.

We can well regret that Larsson died after completing just three of ten projected books in this series.  He died in 2004, with a 4^th novel 2/3 completed, according to those who knew him best.  Personally, I’m sorry that we never get to meet Lisbeth’s twin sister Camilla, and that the relationship between Blomqvist and Monica Figuerola isn’t given more of an opportunity to develop.  On the other hand, I’m grateful that the series doesn’t end with a cliffhanger.  What we have is a complete story, and a captivating one at that.

Derrick Robinson

I will have more to share regarding the Siege of Leningrad in a future post.  What follows are the notes Valentina wrote that were so moving to me.  I invite you to read what she has to say about it, and to hear what she has to play.

We all wonder from time to time how things look “on the other side”, but resign ourselves to the thought that nobody ever came back from “there” to tell us how things are.  With a few exceptions…

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dante created his own, albeit imagined, Inferno.  Shostakovich descended into a real inferno, lived through it, and came out alive to tell the story, to bear testimony to a hell on earth.  What else can you call it when people – bright, thinking, loving people, millions of them – are sentenced to living on 125 grams a day of 50% sawdust/bread ration (and only for those who are able-bodied or well-connected), then to eating their pets and pests, belts and shoes (with scraped-off-the-walls wallpaper paste an exquisite delicacy), then – their dead, and then – their living.

This September (8th- 21st) marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad, one of the deadliest and darkest episodes in the history of European civilization (if you can still call it “civilization”).  This magnificent city, rightly called the Venice of the North, a cradle of modern Russia, a hotbed of progressive thought, a showcase of the best in Russian art, music, and literature, was condemned to a most cruel death by starvation by two tyrants, dictators, who despite being on opposing sides of a war, shared a common hatred of humanity.  In the 900 days of the siege, 750,000 people died out of a population of 2.5 million.  Shostakovich, abandoned like the rest of the population of Leningrad, lived through it and continued composing.  His 7th (the “Leningrad”) Symphony, the sheet music of which was smuggled across enemy lines and performed around the globe, was a call of defiance, a promise of eventual victory, of imminent triumph of life over death.

There is nothing triumphal about this sonata.  Instead, it is a sad and subdued reflection, the testimony of a witness to an abyss of human suffering and death.  Everything is warped here: a waltz turns into a funeral procession; usually “happy” major key episodes are the most sinister and menacing.

The first movement is full of foreboding and unease.  There are two main themes here.  The opening one – in a minor key – is rather sad and very sincere.  The second theme, in a blazing major key, is reminiscent of those awful Soviet-era patriotic marches.  If music can be called “creepy”, this theme personifies the word.

The second movement is a slow and unsteady waltz, constantly on the verge of falling apart.  It is more a reminiscence of happier times than a real dance.  The waltz bore a special significance in the lives of these people. It was a waltz that commenced graduation from school, a waltz that was the first dance at a wedding.  In the middle of the movement, the waltz gives way to a bone-chilling half-march/half-sarabande theme.  You can hear the steps of a funeral procession, but these steps are hesitant and halting, just as in the iconic Leningrad documentary videos of starvelings dragging their deceased in makeshift sleds to common pits while those still alive walk by unfazed.

The last movement: a finale.  Those words have more significance here than in other sonatas, with the sole exception of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat minor.  This movement is a set of variations written on a very simple, folk song-like theme.  The opening theme is for one hand only – an ultimate expression of loneliness and desolation in music.  A set of variations follows the theme, some maniacally busy and high-strung, some solemn and grave.  The last ones deserve our particular attention.  Just as in other movements, everything is in a minor key and ANY sign of major (usually a symbol of something nicer, happier, gentler in music) pierces the music like a ray of bloodied sunrise on the eve of a storm.  We get more and more “major” – at 5:20 when octaves in left hand are decidedly major, then at 6:00…  Then, at 7:00 we enter the final agony in the drama of life.  This variation is hauntingly similar to the “dotted” variation from Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes.  This repeated dotted rhythm is like a heartbeat: heavy, boomy, halting, weakening.

This variation is probably the most powerful and graphic depiction of death – of actual dying and death – in music.  Eventually everything transforms into a vibrant, shining major key (at 10:19) and comes to a complete, final, stop.  Death comes in a scintillating major here, but it doesn’t sound like a promise of paradise awaiting, but rather a complete resignation and making peace with everybody and everything, a complete cessation of life, passion, and struggle.  The only thing left for onlookers is a brief prayer (at 10:30) and one final act of kindness to what was once a living, breathing human being – closing his eyes (a truly chilling moment at 10:57).  Then there is a gaping silence… and life returns to its daily, almost banal pace – for everybody else, of course – while we bury our dead (12:30).

Notes by Valentina Lisitsa

In The Great Pianists, Harold Schonberg writes of Landowska,

…Her playing was on an equally romantic level, and who is to say that it was not closer to Bach than the dry munchings of some later harpsichordists?  As an executant she had a miraculous equality of touch, with a left hand that seemed to have a brain of its own.  Her registrations were, to say the least, colorful.  But no artist in this generation (and, one is confident, in any generation) could with equal deftness clarify the polyphonic writing of the baroque masters.  And none could make the music so spring to life…

Her secret was a lifetime of scholarship, plus perfect technical equipment and resilient rhythm, all combined with a knowledge of just when not to hold the printed note sacrosanct.

Concerning the first piece of music presented below, the Toccata in D Major, Landowska herself writes as follows:

There are seven different manuscripts of this composition in existence, all of which bear the title “Toccata”; only one – a more recent copy – is entitled “Fantasia con Fuga”.  The Toccata in D Major contains within itself all the elements of Bach’s genius: the spontaneity and force of his improvisation, the logic of his contrapuntal elaboration, his unique sense of architecture.  Bach’s masterly hand unites these varied elements into a magnificent triptych; flanked on each side by a brilliant D Major, a tragic but tranquil F-sharp minor forms its centerpiece, which is a fugue of supreme beauty.

This performance was recorded in September 1936.  I would like to call your attention particularly to the fugue that begins at 9:42.  The “resilient rhythm” in her playing was never more strikingly evident.  I know of no other music, composed by anyone, that is more compelling and powerful or that conveys a greater sense of joy, than this fugue.

The next piece was recorded by Landowska in July 1935.  Concerning it, she writes:

The Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (BVW 903) belongs to the Cöthen period.  1720 is a reasonable date for a first draft, but the definitive version, elaborated in Leipzig, has come down to us in a number of copies, although the original manuscript is missing.  The oldest of these copies is dated 6th December 1730.  This work seems to be unique among Bach’s compositions, not only because it was widely distributed during his lifetime (the number of copies bears witness to this), but in particular by its exceptional intensity.  An improviser of inexhaustible imagination, an incomparable virtuoso – such is the impression of Bach which this “fantasia” gives, a work related to the composer’s most brilliant toccatas.  A youthful work, it shows traces of his first heroes: Kuhnau, Froberger, Pachelbel, Buxtehude…

After the Fantasia the Fugue, despite its chromatic theme, expresses a contrasting ardour which ends in serene joy…  It is perhaps pure accident that the first notes of the subject reproduce in German musical notation an anagram on the name Bach… It forms one of the most striking examples of the mastery of composition, architectural balance and creative power in Bach’s works.

A well-known story about Landowska concerns a tête-à-tête she had with the eminent cellist and Bach authority, Pablo Casals.  After the two of them had defended different points of view concerning certain aspects of interpretation, Landowska got in the undisputed last word when she said, “My dear Pau, (as she called him), let us not fight anymore.  Continue to play Bach your way, and I, his way.”

The attack on the World Trade Center had a certain immediacy for me because I had been to New York and visited the World Trade Center just over a year before, in May of 2000.  I had traveled to New York with my son David’s high school choir, and had sung Poulenc’s “Gloria” at Carnegie Hall.

One of the many highlights of that trip was my visit to the World Trade Center, but before I went there, I went to the Empire State Building, where I took this picture.  The view here is toward the south, and from this perspective, the North Tower (also known as Tower 1 or WTC 1) is on the right.  To give you some idea of the size of the two buildings, the spire atop the North Tower was 360 feet tall, the length of a football field from goal post to goal post.

This picture was taken from a boat on the way to Liberty Island to visit the Statue of Liberty.  From this perspective, looking northward, you can see at once how the World Trade Center defined and dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan.

Here is a close up of the two towers taken from the south.  Both towers were 110 stories high.  The South Tower (WTC 2, on the right in this picture) was struck on this side, between the 78th and 84th floors.  The North Tower, which was the first one struck but the second to collapse, was struck from the north, between the 94th and 98th floors.

This picture and the next were both taken from the indoor observation area on the 107th floor of the South Tower.  In the picture above, you can see the southward facing wall of the North Tower, as well as the massive spire that gave the tower a total height of 1728 feet.

In the picture below, taken from a slightly different vantage point, you see the eastward facing wall of the North Tower, and in the distance, midtown Manhattan, with the Empire State Building faintly visible in the center of the picture.

In the video that follows, recorded just four days after 9/11, Leonard Slatkin conducts the BBC Orchestra in as heartfelt and poignant a performance of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” as you will ever hear.  This performance was intended as a tribute to those who lost their lives on 9/11, and while the video was put together in that same spirit, it was intended also as a tribute to those who survived, particularly the emergency services personnel who lost so many of their colleagues.  A total of 411 fire fighters, policemen, and emergency medical personnel lost their lives on 9/11.  This video captures the disbelief, shock, and grief of those who worked with them side by side.  These are hard men, brave men, many of whom had spent years facing death and disaster in one guise or another, and yet, we see in their faces and eyes that they are utterly overwhelmed.

Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

I know of no other composer whose music speaks more directly to my heart than Franz Schubert.  Listen carefully to the third movement of this quintet.  In the first section (the scherzo), he takes us to a realm of unbounded joy, while in the slow interlude that follows, even while giving voice to unfathomable sorrow, Schubert somehow reassures us.  “Be comforted,” he says, “everything will be all right.”

The following notes are from the Sierra Chamber Society, and can be found in their entirety at http://www.fuguemasters.com/schubert.html.

Widely regarded as a masterpiece, both among Schubert’s many compositions, as well as in the entire chamber music repertory, the C major “Two Cello Quintet” was composed in what were to be the last remaining months of his short life.  The work was completed only a few weeks before his death on the afternoon of Nov. 19, 1828.  However it was not until twenty-two years later, November 17, 1850, that the work received its premiere performance.  Another three years were to elapse before the work was published.

It is often remarked that Schubert’s choice of instruments for the quintet is unusual since he did not follow the instrumentation used by Mozart and Beethoven in their string quintets.  Whereas the aforementioned masters called for two violas in their quintets, Schubert chose to double the cellos.  However, this ensemble is by no means unusual.  Luigi Boccherini composed no less than 113 string quintets using this instrumentation.  It is not known whether any of these works were known to Schubert, although Boccherini’s music was published in Vienna by Artaria, publishers of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.  But it hardly matters…

The length and breadth of the Cello Quintet are of symphonic proportions.  The first movement alone is almost as long as many an entire early classical symphony, and longer than the first movement of any of Beethoven’s nine…  Particularly noteworthy in the dramatic and expansive first movement are the duet passages for the two cellos.  In his Guide to Chamber Music, Melvin Berger informs us that the violinist Joseph Saunders had the second theme of this movement carved on his tombstone.  Many lovers of this quintet feel that the second movement Adagio is the high point of the work.  It is said that it was pianist Artur Rubinstein’s wish to have this movement played at his funeral…  The third movement Scherzo opens in triple meter, with melodic figures reminiscent of horn calls.  This exuberant music continues until the Trio, which brings another mood swing to a brooding elegiac interlude, as if the composer is suddenly reminded of his own ominous fate amid the grand noise of life.  There is then a return to the lively music that opened the movement.  The final movement seems to depart from the grand gestures of the previous movements.  Perhaps it is the tempo, which seems a bit relaxed for all that has preceded it.  It does seem to have kinship with the dance-like movements of Schubert’s symphonic masterwork, the 9th Symphony in C major The Great, also composed in the last year of his life.

This video was recorded during a live performance at the Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival on October 15, 2008.  The performers are Susanna Yoko Henkel and Stefan Milenkovich on violin, Guy Ben-Ziony on viola, and Giovanni Sollima and Monika Leskovar on cello.  The four movements are marked as follows: 1) Allegro ma non troppo 2) Adagio 3) Scherzo: Presto/Trio: Andante sostenuto and 4) Allegretto.

The Horn Trio was one of the first pieces of classical music that I came to know.  During my sophomore year in high school, my friend Andy Rangell often invited me to listen to him practice the piano during our lunch hour.  This trio happened to be one of the pieces he was working on, and I came to know it intimately as Andy played the piano and sang the horn and violin parts.

As familiar as I am with this piece, however, I woke up one morning recently with the ebullient theme from the fourth movement running through my head, but could not for the life of me identify it.  I knew the music so well, though, that I just continued to let it play, confident that I would soon recall what it was.  When its identity still eluded me, I decided that it might help if I sang it out loud.  I began to sing, “ba ya ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba…” in strict 6/8 time, and immediately knew what it was.  Something about singing it that way reminded me of the French horn, and that was all the help I needed.

This glorious performance dates from 1993, and features Itzhak Perlman on violin, Daniel Barenboim on piano, and Dale Clevenger on French horn.

One of the words critics like to use (I have used it myself, on occasion) when they particularly like something is the word “definitive”, as in, for example, “the definitive performance of Rachmaninoff’s 3^rd Concerto” or, “the definitive history of the Six-Day War”.  What they mean by this is that this performance – or this history – sets a standard by which every other performance of this concerto, or history of this war, will henceforth be judged.  It is high praise, indeed, and often misapplied.  The definitive performance turns out to be the one the critic happened to hear first, and the definitive history the one which provides the most justification for his preconceptions.  Nevertheless, I have no hesitation at all in affirming that Laura Hillenbrand’s new book Unbroken is definitive in not just one way, but two.  It is the definitive account of survival in a small raft at sea, and the equally definitive description of life as a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II.  Once you’ve read this book, there is no need to read any other on either subject.

The hero of Unbroken is Louis Zamperini.  Born in Olean, New York in January 1917, Louie moved with his family soon after to Torrance, California.  To say that as a boy, Louie Zamperini was high-spirited would be unduly kind.  The boy was incorrigible!  Whether he was smoking at age five, drinking at eight, or thieving whenever he had the chance, he was a clear case of trouble just waiting to happen.  What the reader takes away from his early misadventures, however, is not so much a sense of his delinquency as of his independence of spirit, a strength of identity and will that would be essential to his survival later on.

Early in 1941, while working as a welder for Lockheed, Louie joined the Army Air Corps., and in November, he was designated for training as a bombardier.  While on a search and rescue mission out of Honolulu, his B-24, the Green Hornet, went down in what appears to have been a combination of mechanical failure and human error, killing everyone on board except the pilot, Allen Phillips, tail gunner Francis McNamara, and Louie.  Although McNamara died on Day 33, Phillips and Louie continued to battle the elements, the sharks, and their ever-present thirst and hunger for 47 days, until they were finally picked up near an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

If there were any justice in the world, the story would have ended there, and Louie and Phillips’ ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination would have been rewarded with prompt medical care and a hero’s homecoming.  This was not to be.  After having drifted for two thousand miles and enduring the most appalling deprivations, their tiny raft was finally spotted not by comrades-in-arms, but by sailors of the Japanese navy.  What followed must be read to be believed, but even after reading it, you may still find it unbelievable.  I will say only that if I had to choose between the perils of the open ocean and the systematic abuse and degradation that Phillips and Louie suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors, I would choose the ocean without a moment’s hesitation.

Unbroken both raises and effectively answers a number of questions.  What was it about the Japanese culture of that time that made such sadistic treatment of one’s fellow man possible, and even sanctioned it?  Miss Hillenbrand provides part of the answer in this passage:

Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide.  This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose.  On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people.  Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.  The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.  The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.  In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

Later, she writes:

This tendency was powerfully reinforced by two opinions common in Japanese society in that era.  One held that Japanese were racially and morally superior to non-Japanese, a “pure” people divinely destined to rule.  Just as Allied soldiers, like the cultures they came from, often held virulently racist views of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome “Anglo-Saxon devils.”  This racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented, surely served as an accelerant for abuse of Allied prisoners.

In terms of numbers, what was the result of this perverted world-view?

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination.  In the midst of it were the prisoners of war.  Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia.  Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.  Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935 – more than 37 percent – died.  By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died.  Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway.  Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism.  And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases.  Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive.  Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.

In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese murdered all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan.  They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down.

And what, finally, was the cost to those who survived?

At the end of World War II, thousands of former prisoners of the Japanese, known as Pacific POWs, began their postwar lives.  Physically, almost every one of them was ravaged.  The average army or army air forces Pacific POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon enlistment…

The physical injuries were lasting, debilitating, and sometimes deadly.  A 1954 study found that in the first two postwar years, former Pacific POWs died at almost four times the expected rate for men of their age, and continued to die at unusually high rates for many years…

As bad as were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more insidious, widespread, and enduring… For some, there was only one way out: a 1970 study reported that former Pacific POWs committed suicide 30 percent more often than controls.

This is an exceptionally worthwhile book; in fact, I am tempted to say an essential one.  I came away from it, as Laura Hillenbrand writes in her acknowledgments, “with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they sacrificed, for the good of humanity.”

I came away from it with more than that, however; a renewed conviction that mankind must find a way to resolve its differences short of war.  It would be gratifying to think that we have learned a lesson from the atomic devastation that ended the war with Japan, and that our awareness of the inconceivably horrific and far-reaching consequences of a modern all-out war will suffice as a deterrent, but that is not enough.  We have to stop killing one another.  We must all, finally and unequivocally, accept and embrace the brotherhood of man.

George Gershwin

George Gershwin wrote Porgy and Bess in 1934, in collaboration with his brother Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward, based on Heyward’s novel Porgy.  The following plot synopsis is taken from the excellent website http://usopera.com:

On Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, Jasbo Brown is playing the blues for a group of dancers.  Clara sings a lullaby to her child (“Summertime”).  The drug dealer Sporting Life, Clara’s husband Jake, and some of the other men are playing craps.  Jake sings his child a lullaby of his own (“A Woman is a Sometime Thing”).  The beggar Porgy comes in to join the game; he defends Crown’s woman, Bess, who the others are talking about.  When Jake accuses him of being soft on her, Porgy says that he isn’t soft on any woman; God made him a cripple and meant him to be lonely.

Crown enters with Bess.  He’s drunk, and when he loses he starts a fight and kills Robbins with a cotton hook.  Crown runs to hide, but tells Bess he’ll be back.  Sporting Life offers to take her to New York with him, but she refuses.  Nobody else will give her shelter when the police arrive except Porgy.

Porgy and Bess are at Robbins’ funeral, where Serena is leading the mourners (“Gone, Gone, Gone”).  The police enter and arrest Peter as a “material witness.”  Serena is still mourning (“My Man’s Gone Now”) as she convinces the undertaker to bury Robbins for less than his usual fee.

A few weeks later, Jake and the Fishermen are working on their nets (“It Take a Long Pull to Get There”) when Porgy leans out the window and compares his life to theirs (“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’”).  Maria, a shopkeeper, chases Sportin’ Life away from her shop when he tries to sell his ‘happy dust’ near her store.  Lawyer Frazier comes in and sells Bess a divorce for a dollar; when he learns that she and Crown were never married, he raises his fee to a dollar and a half.  Mr. Archdale, a well-meaning white man, comes in and offers to pay Peter’s bail.  The group is frightened by a low-flying buzzard.  Porgy chases it away, saying that trouble is far away from him now.

All leave except Bess and Sporting Life, who asks her again to come to New York with him and tries to give her more dope, which she refuses.  Porgy chases him away and he and Bess sing about their new happiness.  (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”).  All except Porgy leave for the church picnic (“Oh, I Can’t Sit Down”).

At the picnic, Sporting Life sings about his own brand of religion (“It Ain’t Necessarily So”).  All are getting ready to leave when Crown, hidden in the bushes, calls out to Bess.  She tells him she’s Porgy’s woman now, but he won’t let her go.  He pushes her off into the thicket as the boat leaves without her.

Some time later, the fishermen are getting ready to leave as Bess raves, still delirious after Crown’s attack.  Peter wants to send her to the hospital, but Serena would rather pray over her.  The street fills with vendors, and eventually Bess emerges, and explains to Porgy that she wants to stay with him but that when Crown comes she’ll have to go with him.  Porgy tells her that she doesn’t have to go with him.  A hurricane begins to rise, and Clara, frightened for her husband, calls out his name.

Everyone, gathered in Clara’s room, prays for shelter from the storm.  There is a knock at the door; Crown enters and tries to take Bess away; he laughs at the frightened townspeople and sings a bawdy song to counteract their prayers (“A Redheaded Woman”).  Clara sees Jake’s boat and runs out to find him.  Bess calls for a man to go after her; Crown goes, after taunting Porgy and asking him why he won’t go.

After the storm, the women are crying for their men; Sporting Life teases them and Bess.  Crown enters; he and Porgy fight, and Porgy kills him.

The police and the coroner come to Catfish Row the next morning; they want to take Porgy down to identify Crown’s body.  Sportin’ Life tells him that when he looks at him Crown’s wound will begin to bleed.  Telling Bess that Porgy will be locked up for sure, Sportin’ Life forces some dope on her, and leaves more outside her door as he leaves (“There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”).

Porgy returns; while he tries to distribute the gifts he bought with the money he made playing craps in jail, he discovers Bess is gone.  He learns that she has gone off with Sportin’ Life to New York; he gets in his goat-cart and prepares to follow her as the curtain falls (“Oh, Lawd, I’m on My Way”).

I was introduced to Porgy and Bess as a young child, through my parents’ 1951 Columbia Masterworks recording starring Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams.  I vividly remember being enchanted by Winters’ rollicking rendition of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’”.

This production, directed by Trevor Nunn, features Willard White as Porgy, Cynthia Haymon as Bess, Damon Evans as Sporting Life, Gregg Baker as Crown,  Gordon Hawkins as Jake,  Cynthia Clarey as Serena, and Paula Ingram as Clara.

Our friendship has continued for close to twenty-eight years now.  I recently realized that I was uniquely positioned to share Nikolay’s story and perspective on chess with a wider audience than they had known before.  First, he is my friend; and second, I have a blog!  When I spoke with him about my blog, and suggested doing this interview, he agreed immediately.  What follows is the conversation that took place in his study over the course of two afternoons.  My thanks to Nikolay for being so generous with his time, and to Elena also, both for the two pictures of her and Nikolay and for insuring that we always had plenty of mouth-watering pastries on hand, and strong Bulgarian coffee.

DERRICK: Nikolay, there has been a lot of confusion about this point, so perhaps you will clear it up for us once and for all.  Where and when were you born?

NIKOLAY: I was born in Bulgaria in the city of Russe, which is on the Danube across the Romanian border, and I was born on November 8, 1931.  There was a lot of confusion about this because fifty years ago, FIDE published in their notes for one Olympiad that I was born in January, and from that time in many publications it was written that Minev was born on the 8^th of January, 1931.  It’s not true, and now the correct date is shown on the internet.

DERRICK: All right, I’m happy to publish the correct date here also.  Tell me, how were you introduced to chess?

NIKOLAY: Very interesting!  I was with my mom and my sister at the circus.  One of our old friends was with my mom because my father had died many years before, and when we returned home, he said to my mom, “Why haven’t you put this young man in the chess club in Russe?”  This was very interesting to me, but at the time we didn’t react very much.  At this time I started to play soccer for the junior team.  One day the soccer match was played in raining weather.  When I returned home I didn’t tell my mother that I had been playing soccer, because my father had died from soccer.  I began to be ill – three days with a very high temperature.  The doctor came and said, “Okay, this guy probably was somewhere in very cold weather, and this is why he is sick.”  My mother said, “Where were you?” and I confessed that I had been playing soccer.  She said, “Now, you will stop playing soccer, and start playing chess,” and she bought me a chess board.  That was the start.

DERRICK: Who was, or were, your most important teachers?

NIKOLAY: When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, a master from Russia came to Russe, a Bulgarian master named Kamen Piskov.  This guy won the Bulgarian championship in 1947.  I don’t know why, but he started to play with me every evening when I met him at the chess club.  He beat me sometimes 12, 20 games, sometimes 15 games, sometimes 10 games.  This went on for two or three months.  After that I started to take some games from him.  We played together in the 1947 championship; he won first place, I won last place.

DERRICK: Was there a particular event that made you decide to become a chess master?

NIKOLAY: The particular event was when I placed last in the Bulgarian championship of 1947.  I am a competitive person, and I said, “No, no, no, I will go ahead!”  Two years after that, in the autumn of 1949, I went to Sofia to the university to study medicine, and there I began immediately to develop.  In 1950 I participated in the semi-final, qualifying for the final, and took first through third place in the championship.

DERRICK: Were there any books that you remember as especially important or helpful to you as a student?

NIKOLAY: First of all, when I learned chess, there were no books around.  My friend Milev borrowed one book from the library, and took it home.  It was Three Hundred Games by Tarrasch.  After that, I took the book for myself, and I copied by hand half of the book.  We saw only this book; there was nothing else, not even magazines.  This was in 1946, immediately after the Second World War.  There was no information coming, not even from Russia at this time.  After that began to come Russian books, etc., but when I learned chess, there was no other information except for this book.  It was incredible!  After that, we changed this book for one other book: Five Hundred Games by Tartakower, and we also swallowed everything inside.  This is, by the way, a very good book.  You will learn everything about every opening.  I still have this, in English.

DERRICK: Of which of your chess accomplishments are you the most proud?

NIKOLAY: I think my best individual result was in the tournament in Novi Sad, 1972.  I finished in third through fifth place, but it was a very strong tournament.  There were many other tournaments in which I placed well, but I had very little opportunity to play internationally because of my work.  Until 1973, I worked as a doctor, and it was possible to go to major tournaments only twice a year.  This was why I participated mostly in team competition.  My best team result was in the World Student Team Championship, Reykjavik 1957, where I finished in first place on second board ahead of Spassky.

DERRICK: What has been your greatest disappointment in chess?

NIKOLAY: I don’t know.  I have no disappointments in chess.

DERRICK: Do you have a favorite among your own games?

NIKOLAY: My favorite from my own games was my game with Lothar Zinn from the 1967 zonal tournament in Halle, Germany.  The outcome of this game hung on just one move for probably twenty moves.  The other game was my first victory over a grandmaster, which happened against Szabo in the 1954 Olympiad.  This was the first time a Bulgarian had ever defeated a grandmaster.

DERRICK: You’ve already mentioned Three Hundred Games by Tarrasch and Tartakover’s Five Hundred Games as having been important to you.  Do you have any other favorite book or books?

NIKOLAY: I read many books, and every book I think has something to offer.  You are able to learn from every book.  Those two books made a special impression on me because they were the first chess books I ever read, but I have many other books and in every one I have found something interesting.

DERRICK: When and why did you decide to move to the United States?

NIKOLAY: This was a special situation.  In 1972, I was working as the chief of a toxicology laboratory in Sofia.  I was offered the position of Deputy Editor of the Bulgarian chess magazine, with the expectation that after three or four years, I would be the Chief Editor.  The salary was even a little bit better than I was earning as a doctor; I would only have to work fifteen days per month, and I would have time for chess.

In 1977, I was still Deputy Editor, and I began to understand that as someone who was not a Communist Party member, it was very unlikely that I would ever become Chief Editor.  At that time I began to work very closely with Chess Informant.  One day I spoke with Matanovic, and I told him what my situation was in Bulgaria.  He told me that a friend of his by the name of Siaperas, who was the Secretary of the Greek Chess Federation, was looking for a coach for the Greek national team.  I talked with Siaperas and confirmed my interest in the position, and in December 1979, accepted the position as coach of the Greek team.

In 1982, while we were living in Athens, our apartment in Sofia was taken from us, and it became clear to my wife Elena and me that we had fallen out of favor with the Bulgarian authorities.  In December, we flew to Vienna, where we were given a choice of living in Austria, Australia, or the United States.  We chose the United States because Elena had friends living in Seattle.  When we were interviewed by the U.S. immigration officials, they were not at all impressed with my credentials as a doctor or with Elena’s as a chemical engineer, but they were very interested to hear that I had played chess with Reshevsky, Lombardy, and Fischer, and our visa application was granted immediately.  After that we moved to Seattle; Elena found a temporary job and I started to have some students.  I won first prize in a tournament in Los Angeles and some other local tournaments, and continued my work for Chess Informant on the Encyclopedia of Chess Endings.  Elena soon found a permanent job in a good laboratory; I began to have many more students, and we started to be okay.

DERRICK: In the course of your career, you have faced no fewer than seven world champions, and four others who contended for the world championship.  Would you share with us your personal impressions and recollections of these giants of the chessboard?  Beginning with those who never became World Champion, what can you tell us about Paul Keres?

NIKOLAY: Keres beat me four times.  Every time, what impressed me about Keres very much was his ability of calculation.  He was already at the stage when he was very experienced, and every time somewhere in the game he out-calculated me.

DERRICK: All right, let’s move on: Sammy Reshevsky.

NIKOLAY: Sammy Reshevsky I played only one time.  The game finished in a draw, and he respected me because he offered me a draw around move 20.  He spoke many languages, including some Russian.  I didn’t know him very well.

DERRICK: David Bronstein.

NIKOLAY: David Bronstein and I played twice, and both games finished in a draw.  In both games, he tried to attack me, but he was not able to do that.  I was proud that in one game, I rejected his offer of a draw.  He was a very nice person.  I did one interview with him.  He spoke for about two hours, and after that, said, “Write what you want.”  He had many ideas that chess should be quicker, not two and a half hours, but quicker because now we know so much theory.  In his games, I am very impressed with his ideas about the game.  He was the most original player who was not able to be World Champion.  He deserved it much more than many others who were World Champion, in my opinion.

DERRICK: Viktor Korchnoi.

NIKOLAY: My record with Viktor Korchnoi is 1-2; he beat me twice, I beat him one time.  He is a very – how to say – combative person.  Everybody is a rival for him, probably because of chess.  I understood from Yasser Seirawan that it was not easy to work with him.  He was very demanding all the time.  But he played incredible chess, and I think that because of some circumstances, he was not able to be World Champion.  He also deserved to be World Champion, in my opinion.

DERRICK: With regard to the seven World Champions you faced, I think the first was Euwe.  Tell us about Euwe and your encounter with him.

NIKOLAY: I played with Euwe only one time, in 1954, in my second international tournament.  Euwe was playing in probably his 150^th international tournament.  Our encounter was annotated in a book about Euwe by Teschner, in which he showed how I could have made a draw.  What was incredible to me was that I saw this continuation, but I thought my position was so good that it wasn’t necessary for me to make a draw.  After that, my decisions were bad; my assessment was bad.  This means that he beat me in one moment in the game.  I am not able to say anything else about Euwe because I didn’t know him.

DERRICK: Mikhail Botvinnik

NIKOLAY: I played Botvinnik also only one time.  It was I think one of the best endgames of Botvinnik, who showed the world for the first time that it was possible to win the endgame of queen and b-pawn vs. queen.  Before that, endgame theory said that it was not possible to win.  He showed a new way to win.  This game is annotated in many publications, including Botvinnik’s book, in which he devotes probably six pages to it.  It was an incredible game.  Twice I was two pawns down, with big counterplay for that.  In the end, history will say that I was on the losing side of this theoretically important endgame.

DERRICK: Do you have any personal reflections about Botvinnik as an individual?

NIKOLAY: As an individual, Botvinnik didn’t speak very much.  We spoke after the game, but I spoke much more than he did.  He was very polite – incredibly polite – and I was very impressed with him.  I was very young, and he was World Champion, and he made it a point to compliment my play.  This means either that he respected me or that he was very polite, I don’t know which.

DERRICK: You also played with Botvinnik’s successor, Smyslov.

NIKOLAY: I played with Smyslov twice.  The first time he beat me, in 1955, we repeated my game against Botvinnik.  I repeated the game against Botvinnik because I was young and a little bit crazy, to attempt such a thing against Smyslov, who had Botvinnik as a rival and knew all his games.  He played a big innovation against me that he had prepared after my game against Botvinnik.  After this innovation, the position was a little bit better for him, and he slowly converted it to an endgame of queen, knight, and five pawns against queen, knight, and four pawns.  This was an interesting moment for me.  After the game, he said, “Why didn’t you exchange the queens?  The game after that would have been very difficult for me to win.”  You see, I was twenty-four years old, and I said, “Mr. Smyslov, I think that with the queen I had a better chance to resist.”  He said, “No way.  With the queen, you are lost.”  This was the difference between Smyslov and me.  He understood what was good and what was not.

DERRICK: Mikhail Tal.

NIKOLAY: With Tal, I was very good friends.  I played with him one time, in Sarajevo, 1963, where he was first.  I had a very good success; I was 4^th-5^th in a very strong tournament.  The game is in Informant.  At one moment, I started to feel that he was beginning to take more chances.  I saw a pawn sacrifice, which was very nice, by the way, and I sacrificed the pawn.  He thought for five minutes and offered a draw, which I rejected.  After that, the game finished in a draw, but it was not easy for him.

One time, the two of us even played a soccer match, Bulgaria vs. USSR, in Reykjavik, 1957 during the World Junior Team Championship.  He was the goalkeeper of the Russian team which lost 5-0, but they reported in Shakmaty v SSR that they lost 3-0, two goals less!  After the game, Tal said, “You know what?  I think that in your training camp before this tournament, you played more soccer than chess!”

DERRICK: Tigran Petrosian.

NIKOLAY: Okay.  One time.  I lost against him one time: Havana, 1966.  I lost in the endgame, which was two pawns against one pawn, with minor pieces on the board, knight and bishop.  This was an adjourned game.  Nobody helped me, but for the Russian team, everybody helped him, and there was only one hour between the adjournment and resumption of the game.  What was the game?  I tried to attack him all the time, and all the time I ran into a wall.  I go h4, he stopped me.  I go a4, he stopped me.  I go e4, he stopped me.  All the time, he stopped me before I could start something.  This was his style.  Finally, I reached a position in which I was lost.  I was not very impressed, by the way, because my style is very different.  But this is chess; there are players here and there.  Korchnoi also was not very impressed.  He said that Petrosian sees the coming attack before you even think about attacking him.

DERRICK: Next is Boris Spassky.

NIKOLAY: I played with him one time, Reykjavik, 1957, one of the biggest successes of my life because Spassky was second board and I was second board.  Based on results, I took first place on second board.  Based on percentage, he took first place.  When we played together, the Bulgarian team had already lost on three boards, and ours was the last game.  He made an incredible sacrifice of a pawn, and gained the attack.  I took the pawn, and after that returned it and achieved the better position.  At that time, when I achieved the better position – it was around move 30 or 35 – the captain of the Russian team, who I think was Kan, offered a draw to my captain.  My captain came to me and said, “The Russians offer a draw.”  I said, “I have a better position.”  He said, “You have a better position, but the score is 3-0.  If you lose, it will be 4-0.  I don’t want to be 4-0!” he said, and I agreed.

Spassky was also very nice, but I was not very close to him.  Another Bulgarian, Milev, was very close to him.  Spassky has a practical style.  I like his style because it is an active style, all the time seeking the initiative somewhere.  At the Olympiad in 1962, I was with Milev in our room, and Spassky and Tal came to our room, asking for something.  They waited for us to get prepared to go out, and they started to play chess.  I remember that Tal said when they started to play, “You know, my result with Spassky is equal.  Until now, I make three draws, and he won three games.  Three, three!”

DERRICK: That brings us to the final World Champion that you played against, Bobby Fischer.

NIKOLAY: Okay. Olympiad, 1966.  I was in my best form.  I played in the final against Petrosian, Gligoric, Szabo, Bobby Fischer, Najdorf, Larsen, Uhlmann, and Pomar.  They gave me the day off against Johannessen of Norway, a weaker player.  Against all these guys, I drew 6, won one, and lost five.  I lost almost all my games with the black pieces, and saved two, I think.  One of these games was against Bobby Fischer.  I had prepared a rare continuation in the French Defense, and at the moment I played the characteristic move, I tried to see how Bobby would react to it.  I was not able to see his reaction because he played immediately the best move available.  This meant that he had studied that variation.  After that, it was a very interesting game.  I missed one move.  He had a bishop on g2 and a pawn on g3.  I missed the move, pawn to g4.  After g4, I was in bad shape.  I was able to make an interesting move which held some chances for him to go wrong tactically.  Even Yasser when he saw the game said, “Oh, you have this move now!”  I said, “I have this move; I made this move, but I lost immediately.”  Bobby thought a little bit, and found two or three moves in a row, very accurate moves which finished the game.  It’s possible that against anybody else, I would have had some success.  Against Bobby, it was not possible.

My impression of him was that he was interested only in chess.  Nothing else.  One evening they took the American team, the Bulgarian team, and others to the Tropicana, which is the best nightclub in Havana.  On the stage were fifty women who were almost naked.  Everybody was watching the show except Bobby Fischer, who had his pocket chess set out and was showing Benko some position from that day.

As a doctor, I will tell you that even at the Olympiad in Varna, in ’62, I started to see that something was wrong with him.  In the first round, there was a power failure for twenty minutes.  Everyone was talking, milling around, going here and there.  Bobby took his chair, went to the corner, and with his back to the wall, stayed there for twenty minutes without moving.  Clearly scared.  This is the first symptom of schizophrenia.

DERRICK: Larry Evans conducted an interview with Yuri Averbakh in Chess Life in December 1990.  Yuri Averbakh said in that interview, “I’ve seen two geniuses in my time.  One was Tal.  In short, the other was Fischer.  Maybe Kasparov also.”  What is your opinion about this?

NIKOLAY:  This was his opinion.  Different players have different styles, different approaches to chess.  Many times you will say, “This is genius, the other not” because their style doesn’t suit you.  It’s a personal preference.

DERRICK: In general, what course of study would you recommend for the serious student of chess?

NIKOLAY: No study!  You should take information.  Chess is information.  There is no magic book.  You should take information all the time.  It’s possible to take information from articles; every article has something positive to put in your mind.  When you see many games, you put in your mind much information.  This is until the end of your life.  Much more information than you are able after that to use in practice.  In short, try to absorb as much information as you can.

Let me give one example from my own life.  When I was twenty years old and not even a Bulgarian master, in one game I had a bishop on b7 and a pawn on d5.  I remembered that I had seen two or three games in which the pawn was sacrificed on d4 only to open the diagonal for the bishop, but I was at that stage where I didn’t have a great understanding of these guys, and I calculated, “Why should I give away the pawn when it’s not necessary at this moment.”  I thought about this for ten or fifteen minutes, and I decided, “Everybody says that the bishop should play,” and I sacrificed the pawn.  Incredible to me, I won after five moves, and I understood that if you have information, you must use that information.  And the information was right.

Tal made one very nice combination sometime in the seventies.  The journalists asked him, “How did you make this combination?” He said, “No, no, I didn’t make it.  I saw this from Nona Gaprindashvili.  She sacrificed in this way and won in this way against Servaty.”  You see, Tal, who was World Champion, took information about something which he used after that to his advantage.  This is the way in which chess is going.  This is the reason why there exist good players who never read books, but only see games.  Nakamura gave an interview recently in which he said, “How did I learn chess?  I saw games.  I saw games of Miles and some others.”  Every time in some article there is something positive.  The question is, will you understand it or not.  In chess, if you have more information, you are better.  The second part is to use this information over the board.

DERRICK: What is your opinion about the future of chess?  Will advances in opening theory and computer analysis make it necessary to change the game in some fundamental way, such as by adding new pieces or by randomizing the starting position?

NIKOLAY: No, I don’t think so.  You are not able to play over the board like a computer.  Your opponent is not able to play like a computer.  If you study chess by computer, do you know what will happen?  I played one guy like this.  Even Saidy came to me and said, “Be careful, because this guy has studied all the openings by computer.  He knows everything and he’s very dangerous.”  We started to play, and we played some opening with which I was also familiar.  Somewhere around move twenty or twenty-five, I won a pawn, and he resigned immediately, and said, “You know what, Mr. Minev?  You played a novelty at move 15.”  I said, “What novelty?”  He said, “This move.”  I said, “This move is very logical on the board.”  He said, “It’s not in the computer!”

This is the way.  The human brain is limited.  You are not able to learn everything.  Even sometimes when I play something which I have known for many years, but haven’t used for five years, I say, “What’s the best move here?”  Many times you make a decision in a position in which it’s not possible to say which move is the best.  You should take the direction according to your understanding of strategy.  A computer here is useless.  If there are tactics on the board, the computer will see.  It has a target.  If it has no target, it won’t know what to do after the opening.

Probably chess will start to be a little bit quicker, as Bronstein said, not two hours for forty moves, but to be, let’s say, one and a half hour or one hour.  Many tournaments now are in this way.

DERRICK: Nikolay, is there anything else you would like to say before we end this interview?

NIKOLAY: Let me tell you the most interesting moment in my life.  In 1954, when I was 22 years old and about to be champion of Bulgaria for the first time, I lived with my mother and sister.  My mother had a group of friends who came one evening every week to play Canasta.  One day, these three women came to our home with the husband of one of the women.  He was about 65 years old, and they announced that he is the best chess player in his building and his region, and because he understood that I was the best player in Bulgaria, he wanted to see how he played chess against me.  Naturally he was a weak player, practically no theory.  After two games in which I beat him, he started to be a little bit agitated.  After I beat him five games, he started to think very much, every move.  We played probably three hours, and I beat him – I don’t remember, but probably fifteen games or something like that.  And now, everyone started to leave.  All three women asked him, “What happened in your match?”   I didn’t say anything.  This guy looked at them and said, “You know, this youngster made very good resistance!”

DERRICK:  Thank you, Nikolay.  This has been very interesting and a lot of fun.  I appreciate your making time for this interview very much.

Note: The interested reader will find a great deal more information about Nikolay Minev, including a biography, bibliography, and all his known games, at http://www.thechesslibrary.com/minev.html .