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Hosted by The following is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by Hans Kmoch
(1894-1973). Kmoch’s career as a player, journalist, and arbiter brought him
Mark Donlan into contact with some of the greatest players of all time. We extend our thanks
to Burt Hochberg, who owns the manuscript, for allowing us to publish this
excerpt, which he has edited especially for ChessCafe.

Grandmasters I Have Known

by Hans Kmoch

Yefim Dimitrievich Bogolyubov (1889-1952)

“Are you happy” Bogolyubov asked in German, using the familiar ‘du’ for
“you.” Normally, adults use the familiar form only when addressing children,
relatives, intimates, and, for example, brother officers in the army’s lower
ranks. In other situations, use of the familiar ‘du’ requires some sort of mutual
Curse of Kirsan consent. For Bogolyubov, it was simply the way he addressed younger
by Sarah Hurst
colleagues, and he didn’t care whether they responded with the formal ‘Sie’ or
the familiar ‘du’.

“Are you happy?” he asked the much younger Reuben Fine during the
tournament at Zandvoort in 1936. Fine’s excellent score (he went on the win the
tournament) gave him good reason to be happy, and, having a good command

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From the Archives

of German, he thought that was the point of Bogolyubov’s question.

Bogolyubov, however, was not referring to the tournament but was perpetrating
another of his thoughtless “jokes:” he was asking whether Fine was pleased
about the disaster that had just befallen the German Zeppelin ‘Hindenburg’ in
New Jersey. Fine, a Jew, was certainly no friend of Nazi Germany, but the
sheer crassness of Bogolyubov’s question left him speechless.

Bogolyubov also managed to embarrass the organizing committee of this Dutch

tournament. At the start of the competition, the organizers had marked each
player’s place with his name and national flag. In 1936, Germany had two
national anthems and two flags, the Nazi party being represented by the “‘Horst
Wessel Lied’” and the swastika. When Bogolyubov complained that the
swastika was missing, the embarrassed committee, to avoid adding it, decided
to display no flags at all.

Years earlier, I once saw him showing a game in which he had obtained a great
advantage against Tarrasch. The German grandmaster, according to some
accounts, became suddenly ill during that game and thought he was dying. In
fact, he died not long afterward. Bogolyubov took pride in that encounter: “the
game that killed Dr. Tarrasch.”

In 1934, during Bogolyubov’s second match against Alekhine, the game

scheduled at Bayreuth coincided with some Nazi party convention there.
Uniformed Nazis were everywhere, including the dining room where
Bogolyubov, Nimzovitch, and I were seated at a small table. Though
Nimzovitch was proud of his ‘Yiddishkeit’ (Jewishness), the sight of all those
Nazi uniforms must have been very unsettling. Bogolyubov was so insensitive
to the situation that he casually teased Nimzovitch by recommending the pork
chops.

Though such anecdotes show Bogolyubov in an unfavorable light, they permit

us to understand his personality better. He was a friendly man, simple in his
manner of talking and joking, simple in his optimism and his somewhat
excessive professional pride, simple even in his vices, especially his
exaggerated fondness for food (a favorite delicacy was frankfurters with potato
salad). Very plump and very good-natured – though boorish when joking –
Bogolyubov was much more amiable than his compatriot Alekhine. He
reminded me of the bear that slapped at a fly on his sleeping master’s head,
killing fly and man together. As for his style of play, Nimzovitch’s word for it
was “brutal.”

I first met this brutal bear at the Vienna tournament of 1922, then again at
Baden-Baden, Breslau, and Moscow, all in 1925. It was in Moscow, where we
met socially several times, at the apartment of Ilyin-Zhenevsky that I got to
know him well.

The Russian words bogo lyubov may be translated as “beloved of God.” It is

equivalent to the Greek Theophil, the Latin Amadeus, and the German Gottlieb.
For his name to be pronounced correctly in English, it is best spelled Yefim

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From the Archives

Dimitrievich Bogolyubov. When he became a citizen of Germany, he adopted

the spelling Ewfim Dimitrijewitsch Bogoljubow to facilitate pronunciation in
German.

Bogolyubov, born April 1, 1889, near Kiev, was one of the Russian participants
in the ill-fated chess congress at Mannheim in 1914. When World War I broke
out and the congress had to be suspended, the Russian participants (a group in
itself sufficient for a respectable tournament) were interned in Germany. In
addition to Bogolyubov, there were Alekhine, Flamberg, Malyutin, Ilya
Rabinovich, Selezniev, and Weinstein. Alexander Flamberg, who had some
remarkable success in Russia before 1914, died young in 1926. Ossip Weinstein
(sometimes spelled Wainstein, Vainstein, or Vainshtein) later became the editor
of the Soviet Russian chess magazine Shakhmatny Listok. He was a civilian
casualty of the German bombardment of Leningrad during World War II.
Malyutin disappeared from the chess scene. The others became more or less
famous in international competition. Alekhine soon returned to Russia in
exchange for a German internee, and the others also eventually left. But
Bogolybubov remained in Germany after the war. He settled in Triberg, the
town in which he had been confined, where he acquired a house and a wife and
became a citizen of his new homeland.

I met Bogolyubov many times after 1925, and also did some writing for him.
Though he paid me well, our arrangement was quite informal. Whenever he had
some cash he could spare, he would put a few bills in my hand and say “Just
take it.” That was the extent of our bookkeeping.

But Bogolyubov was almost always short of cash. Unlike Alekhine, he needed
little money for himself, but he worked hard to support his wife, two daughters,
and mother-in-law – not to mention his house, the roof of which seemed to be
suffering from some incurable disease and needed a constant supply of ready
cash to pay for repairs. For a while Bogolyubov had a secretary, generally
known only as Lotte, who was also something like his business agent. She was
so good at her job that she intimidated the officials of chess clubs and
organizations who had to deal with her, and Bogolyubov was soon forced to
end the arrangement.

By way of recreation during tournaments Bogolyubov liked to play bridge, as

did Alekhine, Colle, Maróczy, Vidmar, Tinsley (the chess reporter for the
London Times), and myself. Even though we played for low stakes,
Bogolyubov could rarely pay when he lost. He couldn’t collect when he won
either, since there was always some little debt to be straightened out. But he
always paid eventually.

I remember one of those bridge games for an incident that was very
characteristic of him. Tinsley, Bogolyubov’s partner, spoke only English, but
during the bidding he tried to use the few German words he could muster
because Bogolyubov’s bridge vocabulary in English was limited to two words:
“nobbit” (no bid) and “rabber” (rubber).

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From the Archives

Tinsley (North) bid one spade (“‘ein Pik’,” he announced in impeccable

German), East passed, and Bogolyubov (South) jumped to three spades (“‘drei
Pik’”). West passed, and Tinsley, naturally, went to four spades. But instead of
pronouncing ‘vier’ (“four”) correctly as “fear,” he said “veer,” which is the
pronunciation of the German ‘wir’ (“we”). He also mistakenly assumed that the
plural of ‘Pik’ took the common German plural ending ‘-en’.

Bogolyubov reacted as if he’d just heard the most wonderful joke. “‘Wir
piken’,” which is what Tinsley had said, means “We are stuck (to something).”
Laughing uncontrollably as he showed his totally worthless hand, Bogolyubov
trumpeted (in German, of course), “I have absolutely nothing! I only wanted to
hear him say ‘‘wir piken’’!”

At the tournament at San Remo in 1930, Bogolyubov was accompanied by his

wife and their two daughters, who appeared to be ten or twelve years old. They
were three comely people, models of clean appearance and simple, immaculate
dress. The children, though well behaved and obedient, were also ready for any
mischief that might present itself. A lovely family! I understood perfectly why
the grandmaster worked so hard.

The years 1925 through 1928 marked the crest of Bogolyubov’s career. When
he played his two matches against Alekhine, in 1929 and 1934, his strength was
already beginning to wane slightly. But even when he was at his best, he was
never as good as Alekhine. His tragedy is that he never accepted that fact.

In the 1934 match he thought he had solved the puzzle: Alekhine was
hypnotizing him! So he armed himself with dark eyeglasses. The glasses helped
only for a game or two, but then they became annoying – to Bogolyubov. Next
he decided that Alekhine’s drinking was what accounted for the difference. So
during the next three games, which were played in Mannheim, Bogolyubov
stopped giving Alekhine odds of hard liquor. Alekhine’s practice at that time
was to have a few quick drinks at the bar during each game, and in Mannheim
Bogolyubov matched him drink for drink. Amazingly, it worked, but again only
for a game or two. Bogolyubov lost this match, as he had lost the first one in
1929, without ever figuring out why.

The last time I met Bogolyubov was during his participation in the 1938
tournament in Noordwijk, Holland. Although he was then 49 years old and no
longer able to contend with the leaders of the younger chess generation, he
continued playing in one tournament after another to provide for his family.

His final tournament was Belgrade 1952, where he could hardly hold his own.
Soon afterward he fell seriously ill, and on June 18, in Triberg, he died. A
young Yugoslav physician who had attended that tournament told me some
time later in New York that it was obvious at Belgrade that Bogolyubov was
terminally ill. The doctor thought it was liver cancer. If that is true, Bogolyubov
met the same fate as his famous compatriot Chigorin, who played in Karlsbad
1907 while suffering from advanced cancer and died early in 1908.

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From the Archives

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