Movebound: the art of Zugzwang | TheArticle

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Marcel Duchamp and Aron Nimzowitsch

Alert readers will have observed my perennial interest in the revolutionary artist Marcel Duchamp, and his love affair with chess. This interest has been piqued by the forthcoming book by my friend and colleague Adam Black, which will significantly advance the cause of Duchamp scholarship. In this context a recent piece by art critic Michael Maizels on his blog site, caught my attention.

To summarise: “The trebuchet in chess is a kind of strategy centered around a compulsion to move. At the end of a game, when a player is on the ropes, he or she might prefer to ‘circle the wagons’ and unite his or her remaining pieces in an impenetrable circle. However, because of the rules, each player must actually take his or her turn in the form of a move, and thus forming a kind of immobile hedgehog is rendered substantially harder. In essence, the trap is sprung because one cannot stand still.”

All of which is admirable, ingenious, and perhaps even true; the only inconvenience being that Maizels has described with great eloquence not the Trébuchet at all, but that older and more merciless tyranny of the chessboard: Zugzwang. There is something peculiarly modern in making a mistake with confidence and then surrounding it with sufficient learning that others hesitate to notice. Yet chess, like theology and burglary, is exacting in its terminology.

Zugzwang means precisely the compulsion to move, and belongs to that curious parliament of German words which have colonised the game with the quiet authority of empire: Zwischenzug, that unexpected interpolation by which a man discovers his neat sequence of ideas interrupted by reality; Luft, the tiny breathing space cut into a cramped position against future suffocation; and Kiebitz, or Kibbitzer, from the peewit—Vanellus vanellus, the Northern Lapwing—to describe the species of spectator who hovers nearby dispensing unsolicited wisdom. The bird and the man share a talent for noise at inopportune moments.

The error is worth dwelling upon because it is itself almost Duchampian. One approaches seeking a trap and discovers instead an obligation. The distinction matters. A trap is laid by another; Zugzwang is laid by the conditions of existence. The first resembles murder, the second mortality. There are situations in chess, as in politics, marriage, and metaphysics, where every available action weakens one’s position, yet abstention is forbidden. One must move. The universe, having granted free will, refuses neutrality.

The games this week are therefore remarkable creatures, rarities in the zoological garden of chess literature. There is Aron Nimzowitsch’s Immortal Zugzwang game, and the curious revenge by Alexander Alekhine, who later inflicted the same exquisite torture upon Nimzowitsch himself, together with a lesser-known precursor to Alekhine’s strangulation of the formidable Nimzo. Zugzwang is usually the melancholy privilege of endgames, when the board has been stripped bare and kings shuffle about amidst a few exhausted survivors. These examples astonish because the chains appear while the board is still populous, while pieces remain in force and possibilities seem abundant. It is unsettling chiefly because it resembles ordinary life: to discover oneself constrained not in poverty of options but in their abundance.

For there are moments when a man appears surrounded by resources, allies, ambitions and institutions, and yet every step available to him worsens his affairs. The tragedy is not impotence but compulsory agency. The pieces stand ready; that is exactly the problem. And perhaps this is why such games retain their fascination. They reveal, with the cruel courtesy peculiar to chess, that freedom and compulsion are not always opposites. Sometimes they are merely different names for the same turn of the board.

The referenced games illustrating Zugzwang are:

Alekhine-Nimzowitsch, San Remo, 1930

Reti-Spielmann, Vienna, 1928

But earlier still… this is The Immortal Zugzwang game!

Friedrich Saemisch vs Aron Nimzowitsch

Copenhagen, 1923, round 6

Notes from Nimzowitsch’s “My System”

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6 4. g3 Bb7 5. Bg2 Be7 6. Nc3 O-O 7. O-O d5 8. Ne5 c6

Safeguards the position

cxd5 cxd5 10. Bf4 a6

Protects the oupost station c4, i.e., by …a6 and …b5.

Rc1 b5 12. Qb3 Nc6

The ghost! With noiseless steps he presses on towards c4.

Nxc6

Samisch sacrifices two tempi (exchange of the tempo-eating Knight on e5 for the Knight which is almost undeveloped) merely to be rid o the ghost.

13… Bxc6 14. h3 Qd7 15. Kh2 Nh5

I could have supplied him with as yet a second ghost by …Qb7 and …Knight-d7-b6-c4, but I wished to turn my attention to the King’s side.

Bd2 f5! 17. Qd1 b4! 18. Nb1 Bb5 19. Rg1 Bd6 20. e4 fxe4!

This sacrifice, which has a quite...