Tolstoy Cup: Six Lead the Tournament; Giri Winning the Exhibition
The headline is a reference someone's joke - Hans Kmoch's, I think - about the 1963/4 U.S. Championship. Bobby Fischer went 11-0, while Larry Evans was second with something like 7.5 points. Kmoch congratulated Evans on winning the tournament and Fischer on winning the exhibition, as if he had been giving a simul to amateurs. Well, after day 1 of the Leo Tolstoy Cup (so named because the event is being held at the writer's estate, and not because it runs far longer than necessary*) something similar is afoot. After five of the nine rounds of this rapid tournament, Anish Giri is 5-0, while his closest pursuers - six of them, and they're not fish - have 2.5 points apiece.
That chase pack consists of Evgeny Tomashevsky, David Paravyan, Boris Gelfand, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Maxim Matlakov, and Anton Korobov, and then former Candidate Dmitry Andreikin has 2 points, almost-Candidate Nikita Vitiugov has 1.5, along with former Candidate Kirill Alekseenko. Can Giri go 9-0? That would be very impressive, and it will be a decisive win even if he doesn't, barring a collapse for the ages.
* Yes, I have read War and Peace, cover to cover. My impression was that he wrote the 1200+ page monster for the sake of a didactic 20-page diatribe fairly late in the book that interrupted the narrative of the book, solely for the sake of expressing some of his philosophical views. I'll take Dostoyevsky instead, thank you very much.
Reader Comments (3)
"cover to cover"
You're a better man than me. I quit halfway the third book.
Some of Tolstoi's short stories/novellas are very good though (including Kreutzer Sonata of course, but there is more).
[DM: I'm familiar with the Beethoven work, but not Tolstoy's novella. Funny enough, I've been reading another one of his novellas, the posthumously published "Hadji Murat", while yet another of his novellas, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", inspired Kurosawa's "Ikiru", which is one of my all-time favorite films. So my mild gripe at Tolstoy is mostly aimed at W&P.]
Did you also feel that Anna Karenina would benefit by being shorter?
[DM: I don't recall having that sense, and I have nothing against long novels per se - Dostoyevsky is perhaps my favorite novelist. But *W&P*? Given the function of that didactic section, which stuck out like a sore thumb, I'm almost inclined to think that *W&P* is nearly 1200 pages too long.
While we're on the subject of long works: has anyone here read Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* (aka *Remembrance of Things Past*)? I have not, and I half-seriously wonder if anyone else has, either, aside from those who make their living as Proust scholars. I've read dozens of references over the years to the flood of memories that came when some character had the madeleine, which is near the beginning of the first volume of the seven-volume monster, but not a single discussion of any other element of the work. It seems to fit Mark Twain's definition of a classic as a work that everyone praises and nobody reads.]
Dostoevsky boiled up soap operas in a pot; Tolstoy was an artist.
[DM: If you can find soap operas that are even vaguely like *The Brothers Karamazov*, *Crime and Punishment*, *The Idiot*, *Demons* (aka *The Possessed*), all I can say is tell me what they are - I'll want to watch them. Both Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy deal with big issues, and while one might stylistically prefer one or the other, they are both great and important writers.]