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Vladimir Nabokov ... & the Chess Queen
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 11:43 PM
Subject: devoted reader of the novels of Vladimir Nabokov ...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/RVGKF69AR11.DTL
Sunday, May 2, 2004
Queen takes King -- and a whole lot more
Reviewed by Allen Barra
Birth of the Chess Queen
A History
By Marilyn Yalom
HARPERCOLLINS; 276 Pages; $24.95
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Chess, as any devoted reader of the novels of Vladimir Nabokov knows, is a superb metaphor for life. Now, as it turns out, and as Marilyn Yalom illustrates in a fascinating new book, the metaphor works the other way as well. In "Birth of the Chess Queen," Yalom, a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford and the author "A History of the Wife" and "A History of the Breast," has written the rare book that illuminates something that has always been dimly perceived but never articulated, in this case that the power of the chess queen reflects the evolution of female power in the Western world.
In India, where the game began, probably in the fifth century, there was no female game piece, and for centuries there were none in Persian and Arab countries, where versions of chess had gained widespread popularity. (That, however, didn't keep women from playing chess; "The Arabian Nights" tells of a caliph who paid 10,000 dinars for a chess-playing slave girl who, after beating him three times, won the life of her lover. The Arab version of the game is still all male, "having resisted changes that took place in Europe a thousand years ago." The chess queen got her first written notice in the West in the 990s in a Latin poem by a Swiss monk, though the queen had not yet evolved into the mighty force that would come to dominate chessboards. By the 12th century, she was ushered into the Spanish game by both Christians and Jews, replacing the vizier, who had begun as the king's chief counselor in Eastern chess (apparently Spaniards were taking notice of who got the most attention when he or she whispered in the king's ear). From Spain, chess moved to the south of France, where Eleanor of Aquitaine -- duchess of Aquitaine, countess of Poitou, queen of France, queen of England, to list just a few of her credits -- gave the chess queen her first real-life superstar role model.
Eleanor, writes Yalom, "epitomized the trappings of queenship that worked their way into the symbolic system on the chessboard." By the end of Eleanor's reign in 1189, the only vizier that remained on European chessboards was to be found in parts of Spain where Muslim traditions dominated. European men fought over her, as indeed they had fought over Eleanor. According to English legal documents, there were at least two "chess homicides," in 1251 and 1256, and in 1291 the Archbishop Peckham condemned a prior and canon to three days and nights on bread and water for "being led astray by an evilly- disposed person ... who had actually taught them to play chess." But thanks in large part to the popularity of the medieval best-seller "The Book of Chess" (by the year 1500, the Bible was the only book in Europe more widely printed), there was no stopping the girl. The chess queen finally reached the summit of her power in the late 15th century under the rule of Isabella of Castille, the most powerful of all Spanish queens.
"What was and is often referred to as the 'game of kings,' " Yalom says, "could henceforth be equally identified as the 'queen's game.' " Today, "the chess queen is still a fitting image for women's place in the world. ... She has entered the academy of gendered icons, alongside the Earth Mother, the Amazon, and the Virgin Mary." Now if we can only get Osama bin Laden to play some chess.
Allen Barra is a staff writer for the New York Times.
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