An Interview with Olimpiu Urcan
By Neil Brennen
 

“I am not particularly interested in the great names…”

One of the leading American chess historians isn’t an American; in fact, he isn’t even in the Western hemisphere.  And his own life is as interesting as those of his chess history writing.  Olimpiu G. Urcan was born in Romania in 1977.  As a twelve year old he witnessed the overthrow of Ceausescu; in an essay he described the immediate reaction to the capture of the dictator and overthrow of the Communist state.  Looking out his window, “at first I thought there were about a thousand white pigeons but soon enough I realized that from my tenth-floor block, all the Communist propaganda books, brochures, magazines, and journals were being thrown up in the sky…”  Freedom was literally in the air. In a post-Ceausescu Romania Urcan attended university, studying Medieval history.  In 2003, he received a research grant to study in Denmark for his PhD.  Instead, he decided to move to Singapore to pursue a doctorate and business opportunities.  He recently married and currently works outside academia.

Olimpiu Urcan Winner, Chess Journalists of America award  for Best Historical Article in 2005 and 2006

Urcan’s writing on chess history first began in 2002, with articles for Correspondence Chess News.  Since then, he’s been published at Chess Café, The Campbell Report, ChessBase, and various other websites, as well as in Quarterly for Chess History, CHESS Monthly, and New In Chess Magazine.  His first book, Chess Fathering a Nation, a joint biography of Albin and Marco, appeared in 2004.  A biography of Ernest Eugene Colman will be published this winter in Singapore, and a book on Albin’s two-year stay in the United States is scheduled for publication next year by McFarland.

Among the highlights in his chess writing have been winning the Chess Journalists of America award for Best Historical Article in 2005 and 2006.  Both articles, on Julius Finn and Rudolf Sze, are readable online at Chess Café.  In the wake of his recent win, Urcan kindly agreed to be interviewed by us for Chessville.

Q.  Thank you for agreeing to this interview, and congratulations on the CJA Award.  You must be very proud.

Thanks.  I'm proud, of course, but I'd like to express my thanks to you and Dr. John S. Hilbert for your generosity in offering suggestions all the way in the last years.

Q.  You are welcome.  Olimpiu, much of your work in chess history concerns foreign born chessplayers who came to the United States - Finn, Sze, and Albin come to mind.  What draws you to immigrants?

Perhaps the strongest reason why I’m attracted to immigrants and their experiences is the fact that I’m a young immigrant myself.  I left Romania in 2003 and choose to live in Singapore.  Another reason is that I always felt attracted to people and fates distinguished by unusually hard struggles, both in life and over-the-chessboard.  Julius Finn, Rudolph Sze, Adolf Albin, and many others like them, lived their “American story” with varying degree of success, but what brings them together for me is, firstly, they had a most interesting life from the perspective of men at the gates of a foreign country; secondly,  they didn’t achieve anything really great with the Royal Game.  So, from this perspective, they are doubly marginalized, forgotten because they were immigrants and forgotten because they weren’t strong enough to battle at the top of the chess ladder.  Unraveling such unexplored destinies, each having their own genuine pluses and minuses, is attractive to me.

Q.  What prompts you to choose Americans and American subjects?

As for what drew me to Americans, I believe it has always happened.  The United States possesses an immense and incredibly diversified culture, derived from some of the most significant historical experiences of the 19th and 20th century.  I am mostly preoccupied on how these unsung heroes, as those I wrote about, entered in contact with this culture, at various local levels, and experienced their stories of success or failure, and not only in chess.

Q.  I agree many of your subjects are “unsung.”  Certainly neither the names of Finn nor Sze are household words to chessplayers.  Why choose such minor figures for an article instead of, say, Lasker or Pillsbury?

You’re perfectly right.  I am not particularly interested in the great names of the chess past.  I believe they received their share of biographical works.  Yes, most of them are incomplete, insufficient and someone needs to re-do all that research and re-write the lives of these great players from a more accurate perspective.  But, as far as I know, there is already this trend in chess history circles and I believe serious projects are on the roll to better cover the lives and careers of players like Steinitz, Lasker, Pillsbury, etc.

Q.  You’ve used the term “marginal” as a noun to describe such subjects as Sze and Finn.  Could you elaborate a little on this?

Marginals have fascinated me since my college years.  The obsession with Kings and top level chess heroes might be detrimental for reconstructing the chess landscape of the 19th century, let’s say.  Researchers and historians need to go the lower layers of various chess societies of the past and identify the significant experiences of chess people who deserve remembrance for their contributions to today’s chess legacy.  Until recently, chess history writing was much obsessed with the following archetypical hero: White (US or European-based), world champion (or challenger), male, a success story.

Fortunately, such a perspective is gradually changing.  The marginals (Afro-American or Asian chessplayers,  female players, the poor immigrants, the blind or the handicapped, the amateurs, etc) slowly are claiming their place on the working map of a chess historian.  You, Neil, have done some fine work in this area.  As for myself, I think it is sufficient to mention that my magnum opus will be a chess biography of E. E. Colman (1878 – 1964), a strong British chess amateur (and a marginal par-excellence), who left Britain for Malaya, where his chess and social work has been immensely influential but today totally forgotten.  Why?  Because he was just an amateur and because he didn’t live in Europe for more than 40 years.  But that shouldn’t make his life and work insignificant.

Q.  How do you manage to research your subjects thousands of miles from the US and Europe?

That’s a pain, and most of the time I feel unhappy with the way my subjects remain researched.  I believe in the principle that very thorough research is the key to a good chess history project.  I also believe that it takes many months if not years just to conduct and systematize the research.  But I live almost 6500 miles away from The Royal Library at the Hague, 6700 miles away from London’s Newspaper Library, and a little bit more than 9400 miles from Cleveland’s White Collection.

The only way I’m killing these distances is with particular access to several good e-databases and, most importantly, with the help of some good chess friends located in United States, The Netherlands, and England.  Having such a web of relations and communication channels one can work, but of course not at one’s full potential and always being under the threat of mistreating his subject.  I am terribly unhappy about this, but I try to do my best in given conditions.

Q.  What is the state of chess history writing today?

In respect to chess history’s relation with other “Histories”, I believe that chess history writing is still searching for its legitimacy in the scholarly world. It is not yet an academically recognized endeavor although its methods, research tools, etc. are very much scientific. But writing on chess history has no appeal or significant relevance for History Departments in any serious University. My feeling is that they respect it, but they see it just as distant from mainstream history writing as a history of cricket and biographies on well-known or little-known cricket players.

Chess historians are marginals themselves, as a matter of fact maybe of the most unfortunate type.  They live at the periphery of historical writing and, if that isn’t  enough, at the periphery of the chess world.  In spite of its very reduced audience, I think chess history writing has progressed greatly in the last 40 years.  Not only in respect to the quantity of books written, but also in respect to a certain trend of producing superior works and establishing a clearer scientifically-based methodology of work.  Nowadays there are a good number of proficient chess historians, but this number is relatively very low.  After the death of Kenneth Whyld,  the best in chess history writing is still properly represented by Dr. John S. Hilbert, who has put together some magnificent works that inspired many chess historians, and Edward Winter, always leading his crusades against inaccuracy, unjustified myths or misconceptions, which I believe is a tiring affair but essential for chess writing in general.

But my feeling is that, as long as it is not connected to serious academic circles, chess history writing will remain a hobby or an after-work preoccupation for most of these writers, since the majority of them realized that making it a business makes no or little financial sense.  Their labors of love will still be published, but they will still be individual efforts bought only by the long-lasting chess collector, the most loyal reader, client, and, at times, patron of a chess historian.  Unlike some serious coordinated projects sponsored not by individual foundations or private enterprises but by stable academically recognized centers.

Q.  Any historians, in chess or other subjects, you particularly admire?  Any particular books, again in chess or other fields, you would recommend as an example of 'getting it right'?

I’m a Medievalist by training so I enjoy a great deal the works of Georges Duby, the pillar of the French Historical School.  His sense of bringing up to life immemorial times was impeccable.  The way in which the information, the isolated documents meet their historical context in the mind of the reader is what made me, and many others like me in our college years, to fall in love with the Middle Ages, even if – practically speaking – studying Modern History in depth was a better equation for everybody.  Of course, his treatment of marginals and history of ideas/imagery was absolutely remarkable and established an entire methodology in that respect.

As for chess historians, I like a great deal the works of Dr. John S. Hilbert for almost the same reason.  He realized very well that chess history writing is not only about information, game scores and precision in crosstables.  It is also about the ability to paint backgrounds, to build bridges between the quantity of information gathered and the necessity to elevate an enlightening historical context in which the character, the ‘chess hero’, gains significance but without being swallowed by the context.  Of course, it is a very difficult task and that’s why very few chess historians can be truly Hilbertian in this respect.

Evidently, there are also some very good chess historians (such as Edward Winter, Richard Forster, John Donaldson, Anthony Gillam, Tomasz Lissowski, etc.) that produced very relevant works up to this point, but in my opinion with a very much different style of writing and conceptualizing chess history as a whole.  I believe eventually it is up to the readers to decide which chess history book or chess biography “got it right”, but personally I enjoy much more the works where proper attention is given to the subject treated but also to the context, interpretations and even reasonable historical speculations and reflections.

A last word on this matter: the background of a “chess historian” is equally important: a Humanist by formation writes in a very much different style and framework than a specialist, let’s say, in Journalism Studies or Informatics.  My favorite works remain John S. Hilbert's Shady Side: The Life and Crimes of Norman Tweed Whitaker, Chessmaster ( Caissa Editions, 2000) and Edward Winter's Capablanca: A Compendium of Games, Notes, Articles, Correspondence, Illustrations and Other Rare Archival Materials on the Cuban Chess Genius Jose Raul Capablanca, 1888-1942 (McFarland & Company Inc., 1989).

Q.  You are both a historian and a chess master.  Two other historians, John Donaldson and Richard Forster, are both International Masters.  A third, Andrew Soltis, is a Grandmaster.  How do these two sides of your chess personality approach historical research and writing?

In my adolescence in Romania I accomplished the norms of a National Master.  Obviously, I was never a very strong chessplayer.  I am not a competitive chess master nowadays due to many other commitments that don’t allow time for preparation, traveling, etc.  IM Donaldson, IM Forster, and GM Soltis, are much stronger chessplayers holding International titles.  But, perhaps strangely enough, this reflects differently in their works: IM Donaldson seems not to put all his knowledge of practical chess in analyzing the games of his subjects (see for example his most recent chess biography of Imre König), while IM Forster does accord a great deal of attention to the accuracy of the variations given, to original notes doubled with computer-checked analysis, a critical review of the variations given by the contemporary sources (most of them inaccurate), an incredibly detailed systematization of all games based on strategical or tactical themes, etc.  Forster’s Amos Burn: a Chess Biography (McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 2004) is a very good example in this direction.  The game section of this large book is extremely meticulous both from the perspective of a historian and that of an International Master.

I believe this could be an ideal model for treating the games of a strong chess player of the past.  Linking the quality of the historical/biographical information with the quality of the analysis of the subject’s games is essential for a very good chess biography.  GM Soltis on the other hand seems to offer an almost equal attention to the games in his chess history related books but falls back when it comes to scholarly history writing.

Unfortunately, not all chess historians possess a practical strength in over-the-board play or have the ability to analyze and evaluate complicated situations met in the given games, so they make a larger appeal to historical annotations given by the leading masters of that particular time.  This in itself is a fascinating view that is by no means detrimental.  It’s quite necessary, actually.

My feeling is that high historical methodology, the ability to build the story with appealing contexts and backgrounds, the fruitful research in bringing to light unknown data and games, all these together can supplement very well the missing Elo points in someone’s rating or the lack of International chess titles among chess historians.  There is a current trend with quite a number of GMs and IMs publishing booklets with collections of 50-100 games of the chess masters of the past, perhaps with reasonably strong analysis, but with an inferior historical build-up as previously discussed.

Q.  What needs to be done to promote research and writing of chess history?
      What can national federations such as the USCF do?

I think chess history isn’t commercial enough, as with all things dealing with the past.  Today’s societies move much faster than five years ago and the past or its recollection is suitable if brings some profits of some sorts.  And as with any noncommercial endeavor, promoting it becomes a problem.

I believe that organizations such as the Ken Whyld Association (formed out of chess collectors but with some chess historians joining the ranks too) might have a degree of success in promoting chess history in historical-based sites/institutions from Europe.  Such organizations through the scheduled events and their strategic location could also bring enough funding to support important projects of chess history writing.  Most importantly, it might help people with the same interests from different corners of the world to contribute to essential universal projects.  But as an overall impression, I think chess history will remain an endeavor of those passionate enough to go through the pains of producing labors of love.  If you study the age of most known and active chess historians around the world, you’d realize there are very few who are very young.  There is no solid new generation of chess historians ready to pick up the mission from its peers and push it further.

USCF should start to sponsor and help financially the important projects of America’s own chess history.  There are some excellent American chess historians very much able to translate these projects into reality.  Such support would obviously encourage these authors to develop further projects and map as much as possible the American chess past by producing the essential needed works.  Individual publishing businesses, isolated attempts will never be enough for such a sensible mission.

Q.  Should the USCF, and other national federations, appoint an official historian?

I believe they should.  If not a full-fledged chess historian with enough credentials to recommend him/her for the job, at least a full-time/part-time archivist with the main responsibility of conserving and systematizing the amount of documents, printed papers, old magazines, statistics/records, etc of any local institutional chess life.  I know some countries already have such individuals (the Australians, for instance) but there is a very long way to go into this direction.  Once again, almost all federations are future-orientated and obsessed-with-results organizations.  Such an individual with his specific work looks like an anomaly amongst their ranks most of the time.  Hopefully things will change for the better.

Q.  What specifically can the Chess Journalists of America do to promote chess history?

I’m not very familiar with the structures and long-terms plans of CJA.  I think it is paying attention to chess history.  Yet perhaps a better promotion of it in the pages of The Chess Journalist, organizing more lively forums of discussions around the major problems in covering the American chess past, a superior exposure of the American historians in the chess and main-stream media, and attempts to involve them in the cotemporary act of chess journalism in its diverse dimensions, all these and others might bring chess history writing into a better position than it actually is at the moment.

Index of all Interviews

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