Nikolay Kalinichenko, Vassily Ivanchuk: 100 Selected Games (New In Chess, 2013). 317 pp. $32.95/€28.95.
Vassily Ivanchuk is one of the strongest and most creative players of our time, and has been a leading player for almost a quarter of a century. Despite this, Ivanchuk has not yet written a chess autobiography, and as far as I know there are no full-length chess biographies dedicated to him, at least not in English. Ideally Ivanchuk himself will rectify the situation at some point, but for now it's up to others to take up the slack.
Nikolay Kalinichenko is a grandmaster in correspondence chess, and so one would expect him to be a strong analyst. There is a lot of analysis in the book - primarily variations - with "talk" serving primarily as grammatical glue. Further, a lot of the analysis appears to be independent. No bibliography is provided, so I did some spot-checking between Kalinichenko's notes and Ivanchuk's in the Informant, and found essentially no overlap. This surprises me. I believe wholeheartedly that Kalinichenko is completely right to do his own analysis without checking any other sources, but only in the draft stage. Even if one is convinced that one's own analysis is superior, it's still worthwhile to see what the player himself thought during the game, to see the direction of his thought and to grasp the "plot" of the game from moment to moment from the player's perspective. My impression is that Kalinichenko's analysis is largely computer-driven, rather than human-driven, and while that ensures that it will be at a high level it won't necessarily give an accurate picture of what the flesh and blood players had in mind.
His opening commentary is generally helpful but somewhat idiosyncratic. Sometimes he cites very old games whose theory has been completely superseded, and the citations don't always seem to be there to make an instructive point. Overall though, the opening analysis, while not always cutting edge (or trying to be), does fill out the context.
One area in which there could be a lot more context is the sporting background to each of the games. Kalinichenko opens the book with a functional but not inspiring pen portrait of his subject, and it touches on the familiar ground: Ivanchuk's talent, his wide-ranging chess erudition, his artistic approach and, of course, his sometimes shaky nerves. But once that's over and the main body of the text begins, it's almost 100% chess, with a near-complete absence of background information and "color". How was Ivanchuk doing in the tournament? How did he usually fare against that particular opponent? What did the game mean to him from a sporting or aesthetic point of view? There is very little of this, and again, that's one of the reasons why it's best when such books are written by the players themselves.
Overall, the book is a little dry for my taste. Both because Ivanchuk is such a great player and because he's such an unusual figure, it would have been better if the book had presented a more fully-orbed picture of the man and his games. Still, despite its flaws the book's existence is a service to the chess community. To those of you who primarily think of Ivanchuk for his eccentricities, you are missing out on something special. His best games are exceptional and distinctive, and this book will give you a good taste of his greatness as a player. There are wins over Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen, Aronian, Topalov, Caruana, Karjakin and pretty much every other great player of the past 20 years - generally multiple wins. Kalinichenko's analysis is competent and instructive, so although I hope for a better book someday I'm glad I have this one today.