4
The American Wunderkind
THE ODYSSEY BECAME more than just a routine or a habit. It was a ritual, a quest for chess wisdom. After classes during the school year, on Saturdays, and all throughout the summer when he wasn’t playing in tournaments—on the days that he didn’t go to the Collins home—Bobby would walk to the Flatbush Avenue subway station and take the train across the East River into Manhattan, exiting at Union Square. He’d stride south on Broadway to Greenwich Village, and make his way to the Four Continents Book Store, an emporium of Russian-language books, music recordings, periodicals, and handmade gifts such as nested martryoshka dolls. It has been confirmed through the Freedom of Information Act that the FBI conducted an investigation and surveillance of the Four Continents from the 1920s to the 1970s, amassing fifteen thousand reports, photos, and documents on whoever entered, exited, or bought from the store, looking for potential Communist sympathizers or Soviet agents. In the 1950s, when Bobby frequented the establishment, the Bureau was particularly active, hoping to supply information to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The Four Continents stocked a small but potent collection of chess books, as well as the latest copies of Shakhmatny Bulletin, a newly launched Russian-language periodical. This chess magazine contained theoretical articles and reports on the latest games from around the world, mostly games involving players from the Soviet Union. Fischer learned when the new copies would arrive each month, and within a day or two of their appearance he’d be at the Four Continents to purchase the latest edition. To others he proclaimed Shakhmatny Bulletin “the best chess magazine in the world.”
He’d play over the magazine’s featured games assiduously, following the exploits of eighteen-year-old Boris Spassky, the chess comet who’d won the World Junior Championship in 1955. He also studied the games of Mark Taimanov, the 1956 champion of the Soviet Union—and a concert pianist—who introduced novelties in opening play that Fischer found instructive. Thumbing through copies of each edition, Bobby made a mental note of which openings being played around the world won more games than others and which seemed too unorthodox. He also noted the games that ignited his interest toward further exploration. The games of the masters that he discovered in Shakhmatny became his models; later, some of these masters would emerge as his competitors.
At the Four Continents, Bobby bought a hardcover Russian-language copy of the Soviet School of Chess for $2. A classic of contemporary chess literature, it had been issued as a propagandistic treatise to highlight the “rise of the Soviet school to the summit of world chess [as] a logical result of socialistic cultural development.” Even as a teenager, it’s likely that Bobby was able to separate the not-so-subtle Soviet attempt at indoctrination from the sheer brilliance of the games and what he learned from them. He was in awe of the acuity and the rapid, intuitive understanding of the Soviet players, inarguably the best in the world at that time. When Bobby was fourteen, he gave an interview to a visiting Russian journalist from Shakhmatny v SSSR (Chess in the Soviet Union) saying that he wanted to play the best Russian masters, and elaborated: “I watch what your grandmasters do. I know their games. They are sharp, attacking, full of fighting spirit.”
Bobby browsed and shopped at the Four Continents for years, and nothing attracted him more than a book he’d heard spoken about in almost reverential whispers: Isaac Lipnitsky’s Questions of Modern Chess Theory. For chess players, the book became an instant classic the moment it was published in 1956, and copies were scarce. A chess-playing friend, Karl Burger, ten years older, who went on to become a medical doctor and an international master, first told Bobby about the tome, feeding the boy’s imagination about the wisdom it contained. Bobby was eager to read it but had to place a special order through the Four Continents. Only months later did it arrive, poorly printed on cheap paper and filled with typographical errors.
Bobby cared nothing about the book’s physical appearance, though. He pored over the pages, as if he were a philosophy student attempting to understand Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He struggled with the Russian and continually asked his mother to translate some of the prose passages that accompanied the annotations of the moves. She didn’t mind at all and was, in fact, delighted that he was learning some Russian. For his part, Bobby was astonished at how much insight he absorbed from the book.
Lipnitsky stressed the connection between commanding the center squares of the board and seizing the initiative through the mobilization of the pieces. It’s a simple notion, almost rudimentary, but accomplishing this in an actual game can be quite difficult. Lipnitsky didn’t just fling concepts at the reader, but rather gave clear and logical examples of how to do what he recommended. In his own games Bobby began employing some of Lipnitsky’s suggestions and adopted a plan called the Lipnitsky Attack when playing against the Sicilian Defense. Years later, he’d quote Lipnitsky’s precepts in his own writings.
After spending perhaps an hour in the Four Continents in pursuit of the best in current chess literature, Bobby would cross the street to the Dickensian shop of the phlegmatic Dr. Albrecht Buschke, where he sought an entrée into the past. The shop was located deep within the innards of an old office building that, one hundred years earlier, had been the Hotel St. Denis, the place where Paul Morphy, America’s unofficial World Champion, had stayed when he played in the First American Chess Congress. For Bobby, the building was a totemic destination since it also contained the offices of the U.S. Chess Federation, housed in what had been the St. Denis’s bridal suite.