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Press release
Elena Burmistrova, Deputy Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee/Director General of Gazprom Export, has presented the CFR Chess Museum with a unique art gift for the New Year.
It comes from a limited edition of handmade chess sets titled “Indian”, manufactured at the porcelain enterprise “Delta-X” of Kislovodsk in the 1990s. To design the chessmen, the artist A. Lyubkin resorted to ancient legends and tales’ motives. Pieces of gilt and overglaze painting join the combat on a chessboard of marble and serpentine stone, with a unique house for chess pieces being a rare and distinctive feature of this particular set. The tradition of tucking the pieces away “to rest” in a dedicated “accommodation” instead of a dark wooden box dates back to several centuries ago. This is both a respect for the wise game’s porcelain participants and a practical solution to keep beautiful pieces on the table as a kind of display.
Tal, Petrosian, Spassky and Korchnoi: A Chess Multibiography with 207 Games, McFarland 2020
Tigran Petrosian (born on 17 June 1929 in Tbilisi), Viktor Korchnoi (born on 23 March 1931 in Leningrad), Mikhail Tal (born on 9 November 1936 in Riga) and Boris Spassky (born on 30 January 1937 in Leningrad) are among the most important chess players of the 20th century. Three of them were world champions, while Viktor Korchnoi came close twice. The four were born between 1929 and 1937; they were rivals, friends, enemies and companions and had a decisive influence on chess in the second half of the century.
In his fascinating multi-biography, Andrew Soltis tells the story of these four top players, their development, their rise to the top, their setbacks and crises, their rivalry and friendship from 1929 until 1972, when Spassky lost the World Championship title in Reykjavik and, for the first time since 1948, the world champion was not a Soviet player.