Leningrad Lip | 12 July 2018

This description of Viktor Korchnoi was coined (an oblique reference to Muhammad Ali’s nickname of Louisville Lip) by Ian Ward of the Daily Telegraph during the Baguio City World Championship of 1978.
 
During the pre-Kasparov mid-1970s and early 1980s, world title chess was dominated by the three great matches between Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov. During the second and longest of these, at Baguio in the Philippines, Korchnoi’s tendency to make outspoken remarks became more pronounced. There were moments when his outrageous comments came close to capsizing the match.
 
The drama is well captured by Genna Sosonko in his new book Evildoer, an ironic reference to the USSR’s attitude to Korchnoi after the grandmaster defected from the Soviet Union, where self-expression was notably discouraged. I keep returning to Sosonko’s book, which has echoes of earlier masterpieces focused on mental combat, such as Yasunari Kawabata’s Master of Go, Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle and even Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fe.