<vonKrolock>

<also tending to erótica...> ah, you must have read my pages on "Romance, Sex and Chess" http://sbchess.sinfree.net/chessex....

That's a nice passage by Ivan Turgenev. Thanks!

Paul Morphy is believed to have met Turgenev in Paris.

Along similar lines, (I learned this from cg member, <WilhelmThe2nd>) the Russian writer Alexander Kuprin was a friend of the Ukraine chess player, Fyodor Duz-Chotimirsky.

Duz-Chotimirsky related a little tale concerning him and Kuprin - http://sbchess.sinfree.net/Duz.html

If Kuprin's story, supposedly based on the Warsaw Cafe in Kiev, interests you, a little bit more about "Marabou" can also be found here - http://sbchess.sinfree.net/Invented...

Minev annotates games from Cochrane but also played in later years to show the connection between Cochrane's chess and modern concepts. He concludes that <The general theoretical question of the nature of the relationship between material and compensation, hinted at a long time ago by Cochrane, is a trend in modern chess, but we have only scraped the surface and the exact answer, if it exists at all, is still far away.>

George Walker: <“Mr. Cochrane’s banner bears for its device ‘Attack, attack’. Attack at all risk — attack at every cost. Mr. Cochrane is the most brilliant player I have ever had the honor to look over or confront, not even excepting De la Bourdonnais; and pity it is that his very brilliancy so often mars success. Mr. C.’s game can be compared to the very dashing charges made by the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids; when they impaled themselves, horse and man, upon the bayonets of France.”>

(From "Chess Studies" (1844))

Excerpts:

<However, another fact was that while the others complained of Staunton’s treatment (such as having only their losses to Staunton published in his widely read "Chess Player’s Chronicle"), Cochrane kept quiet about it, though it disturbed him as well. Thus, according to a letter from the "Hartford Times" that was reprinted in the "American Chess Journal", April 1878, Cochrane is said to have felt (and stated privately) that he was portrayed as a pawn-and-move bumpkin in "The Chess Player’s Companion", while he in fact beat Staunton in their last series of even games. However, instead of disputing this and perhaps bolstering his chess reputation, he swallowed it and came to be viewed as a player a level below the top; strong, a piece of chess history, but perhaps not up to the younger generation of chess talent.>

<How strong was Cochrane? We have a mass of seeming contradictions. In 1821, is it more important that the very young Cochrane was drubbed by Labourdonnais and Deschapelles in the triangular match, or that he reportedly did well against them in games after this match? In 1841-43, do we view the games between Staunton and Cochrane as showing that Staunton was much better (as the "Oxford Companion" claims), or do we take Cochrane’s unhappiness over this portrayal and his wins against Saint-Amant as evidence that he was a world-class talent at this time? Do we give credence to DeVere’s praise of Bannerjee, and thus enhance Cochrane’s status by his having beaten Bannerjee?