Public figures who do not behave according to the usual norms are often described as characters with "rough edges". In this sense, Viktor Korchnoi was a rather "edgy" person.
Born in Leningrad in 1931 - the city is now once again called Saint Petersburg - Korchnoi experienced the siege of the city by the German Wehrmacht, with all its terrible consequences for the starving population. This experience at a young age left a deep mark on him.
As a young man, he actually wanted to become an actor, but his pronunciation was too poor for that profession, so he turned his passion for chess into his career, with major success.
Most chess fans will associate Korchnoi's name with the matches for the World Championship in 1978 and 1981. By then, however, Korchnoi was already around 50 years old - and he remained among the absolute world elite for a long time afterwards. His first successes, however, had come more than 20 years earlier.
When chess life in the Soviet Union resumed after the Second World War, the young Viktor Korchnoi soon became one of the best players in the country. In 1950, at the age of 18, he made his first attempt to qualify for the final of the USSR Championship. In 1952, he reached the final. Only the best Soviet players took part, and for the country's leading players it was almost obligatory to prove themselves there.
The USSR Championships had always served as qualifying tournaments for the Interzonal Tournaments. In 1962, Korchnoi became national champion for the second time. By finishing fourth at the 1962 Interzonal Tournament in Amsterdam, he then qualified for the notorious 1962 Candidates Tournament in Curaçao. The young Bobby Fischer was the favourite there, but felt that he had been outmanoeuvred by the Soviets, who played many short draws against each other in order to save energy for their games against Fischer.
I had several opportunities to get to know Korchnoi a little better, though of course much later. Korchnoi belonged to the older generation of players who had recognised that a chess database running on a computer, such as ChessBase, could be a very useful tool for a chess professional like him. And he was willing, despite his advanced age - in 1987 he was already in his mid-fifties - to engage with it. The younger Anatoly Karpov had not dared to take that step.
Korchnoi's access to the new digital world, however, remained rudimentary, and he made no secret of the fact that he actually hated these electronic devices. But in Petra Leeuwerik he had a capable woman at his side, helping him with all the annoying matters away from the chessboard.
She maintained the ChessBase database for Viktor, who could then calmly look through the games for his preparation. Of course, there were occasional questions about how to use the programme or technical problems. Petra would then call ChessBase, and together the problems could be solved. From this connection came the idea that Korchnoi might record important games from his career in the form of a video presentation as a FritzTrainer course.
He agreed, and at some point he was sitting in the ChessBase studio in Hamburg. When I met him there, I wanted to make a little small talk and thought it would be a good idea to speak to him about the 1962 Candidates Tournament in Curaçao and what exactly had happened there with the alleged arrangements among the Soviet players against Fischer.
Korchnoi did not think so. My approach of lumping all the Soviet players together, including him, did not please him at all, and he rather heatedly explained to me that Tigran Petrosian and Efim Geller had come up with the idea of the short draws, had drawn Paul Keres into it, and that the conspiracy had been directed not only against Fischer but also against him.
However, since I was usually the person who could solve his wife's problems with maintaining the ChessBase database, we remained friends in that sense.
At a later meeting in Biel, when he was playing there and I was reporting on the tournament, there had once again been some disorder in his ChessBase database and I was called to his hotel room to help. The problem was quickly fixed. Korchnoi, who had been watching the proceedings from a distance, was afterwards somewhat irritable with his wife and said: “
How can it be that you spend so long on the problem without success, and the young man - this happened quite a few years ago - solves it in a few minutes?
That was really rather unfair of "terrible" Viktor towards his wife.
The recordings of Viktor Korchnoi presenting his best games are a unique historical document. They could only be made because Oliver Reeh sat next to Korchnoi and operated the keys off camera in order to present the games. Korchnoi was thus able to concentrate on recounting the background to the game and explaining the motifs and variations.
Viktor Korchnoi died on 6 June 2016, a little over ten years ago. He was truly a man of many facets. Through his games and the unique recordings, the memory of him lives on.
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