Sean Williams
In 1988, war broke out between Armenia and its Soviet Republic neighbor
of Azerbaijan, over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It was
another tragedy in a century of tragedies for Armenia, going back to the
genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people,
beginning in 1915. When the 1988 war began (*), thousands of ethnic
Armenians who lived in Azerbaijan fled their homes. One of them was
Melikset Khachiyan, a chess player who studied the game, as a teen-ager,
under Tigran Petrosian, Armenia’s greatest-ever player. Khachiyan had
shown early promise, but a shot at the game’s highest level, in an era
of legends like Kasparov, Karpov, and Tal, eluded him. Now he needed a
place to stay. He headed to Yerevan, Armenia’s pretty, pink-stoned
capital; there, Grigory and Seda Aronian offered him a room in their
modest home on the edge of town. Rather than pay rent, they suggested,
he could teach their six-year-old son, Levon, chess.
Aronian has won dozens of tournaments and global admiration, and he has
become a bona fide star in his native country—but he has yet to win
chess’s greatest prize, the World Championship. He grew up, he told me,
surrounded by reminders of the time “when your country used to be a
strong country.” And the longer he shoulders the hopes of a nation
desperate for homegrown success, the tougher it is becoming, it seems,
to fulfill his immense potential.
I first saw Aronian play in 2015, at a “blitz,” a high-speed chess event
in Berlin. Most leading chess players appear tightly wound at the board;
Aronian looks like he’s waiting for an Old-Fashioned. Last summer, we
met at a swanky new hotel in downtown Yerevan. As we ate lunch, people
stared and took selfies. Aronian is raffish and charming, with unkempt
hair and louder clothes than his chess-playing peers tend to favor. His
chess skills were a route out of poverty. In the years following
independence, blockades with Turkey and Azerbaijan, which still hold
today, killed trade. Blackouts were common then; Aronian and Khachiyan
would often practice by candlelight, up to six hours a day. Aronian
loved the concept of sacrifice, and the idea that he could do anything
so long as he achieved one goal: kill the king. He went out little,
forfeiting friendships and the trappings of boyhood.
Aronian and Khachiyan began walking an hour and a half to play at chess
clubs in Yerevan. Soon Aronian was winning tournaments, and making money
on the side by beating businessmen in hotel lobbies. Small-time sponsors
came and went; an airmail firm put in some cash—at one point, Aronian
even travelled abroad with the mail. By the time he was thirteen, he was
making enough to support his family. They needed the money, and Aronian
turned that desperation into a strength, playing aggressively and
unconventionally against his studious, better-dressed opponents. “I had
to kick their ass,” Aronian told me. He added, “They look in your eyes
and they understand that you are a barbarian, and the kids generally
fear the ones who are savages.” He paused as we spoke to prevent a
waitress from taking some half-finished plates. “There is still the
barbarian in me—I won’t let my food be taken away.”
Aronian reached the level of grandmaster in 2000, when he was seventeen,
but the Armenian Chess Federation repeatedly overlooked him in favor of
older, more established players. After the A.C.F. froze him out of a
tournament in India, his mother decided she had seen enough and
uprooted the family to Berlin. Suddenly the Aronians were members of the
seven million-strong spyurk (“spread”), the Armenian diaspora created
mostly by the 1915 genocide. Unencumbered by Armenia’s infighting and
isolation, Aronian flourished. He played over a hundred matches in his
first year in Germany. In 2002, he won the Armenian Chess Championship
and became World Junior Champion. He is now a rich man.
In 1963, when Petrosian took on the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik for the
World Championship, thousands camped out in Yerevan, watching each move
relayed via telegraph to a giant demonstration board in the
city’s Opera
Square. Petrosian’s victory caused a “chess boom” in the country,
Mikayel Andriasyan, the secretary-general of the A.C.F., told me. In
recent years, when Armenia has won the Chess Olympiad, there have been
similar celebrations. (Armenia did not compete at last year’s Olympiad,
because it was staged in the Azerbaijani capital city, Baku: the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unresolved.) Aronian played a key role
in all of those victories: in 2004, Serzh Sargsyan, a former government
defense minister, became the chief of the A.C.F., and he coaxed Aronian,
who had climbed into the top hundred of the world rankings, back to the
national team. (Four years later, Sargsyan was elected President of
Armenia.)
By 2005, Aronian was ranked fifth in
the world and became a national
hero in Armenia. Stardom is a great honor, Aronian told me, but it’s
double-edged. “Some people are cheering you up, while some people who
are generally unhappy, they’re sharing their unhappiness,” he said.
(Taxi drivers, he added, are particularly blunt with their criticism.)
Aronian splits his time between Berlin and Yerevan, where he lives with
his fiancée, Arianne Caoili, who has represented both the Philippines
and Australia in the Women’s Chess Olympiad and also works as a
consultant. Aronian has a small circle of friends and rarely goes out
alone. Most days he listens to classical
composers—“Bach for his spirituality and passion, Bruckner for his
structure, Schubert for his serenity and firm structures, Mahler for the
ways he goes from small to grandiose, Shostakovich for the gentle
darkness”—and practices chess moves for hours. He still wears his
emotions on his sleeve. He often loses chasing improbable wins when he
should settle for a draw. And he takes losses badly, blaming anything
from the venue to the general public. After a poor performance at a
tournament in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, in February, he told
me that he lost because he was “not in the mood.”
“For me, Levon is more someone who needs things to flow,” the five-time
world champion Vishy Anand told me. Wesley So, a Filipino-born U.S.
player ranked second in the world, told me over e-mail that, when
playing Aronian, “you never know if any move is straightforward and it’s
best to assume it isn’t.” His swashbuckling manner recalls eccentric
former greats like Bobby Fischer and Kasparov, and contrasts with the
game’s contemporary masters, quiet geniuses who play with quantum
precision. “You’re free to express yourself in the game of chess,”
Aronian told me, comparing it to his beloved classical music. “You can
play anything as long as you are determined to fight for the ideas you
put in your moves.”
From 2012 to 2014, Aronian was often ranked second in the world; most
people in chess expected him to challenge Norway’s Magnus
Carlsen,
the three-time, and current, world champion. But when Aronian performed badly
at the 2014 Candidates Tournament, the event that chooses who will face
off against the reigning world champion, it seemed to spark a decline.
Last year he performed erratically, falling well below the mark required
to face Carlsen for the world title in New York last November. A month
after the Candidates Tournament, I met up with Aronian at a hotel in
London. He had just competed at the London Chess Classic, drawing six
matches and losing two, placing eighth out of ten entrants. It was cold
and gray, and Aronian was tired. “I know that I deserve, one day, to
become world champion,” he said. The tournament in Sharjah, two months
later, was another chance to rebound, but it didn’t go according to
plan. “I haven’t yet achieved anything in my career,” he told me after
that event, on the phone. He added, “I want to have a crushing victory
somewhere. Something that will make me proud.”
“He is probably too emotional, and the sight of his dream being close
makes his vision blurry,” the Dutch player Anish Giri, who is ranked
twelfth in the world, told me. Maybe getting some distance from it has
begun to help: in June, Aronian won the Norway Chess tournament in
Stavanger, beating Carlsen with a dramatic sacrifice that, improbably, he had held back since 2003. “There’s no parallel in
sport for that,” the writer and chess player Martin Pein told me,
speaking of Aronian’s long-delayed stratagem. “What it demonstrates is
someone who thinks incredibly deeply, who’s analyzed a lot of ideas in
an almost profound way.”
The intervening period has been characteristically unpredictable for
Aronian. He placed badly at a tournament in Leuven, in Belgium,
before sweeping to victory at a German event with a round to spare. Last
week he struggled at a competition in Geneva that comprises part of the
qualifying criteria to join the game’s élite at next year’s Candidates
Tournament. His next chance to shine is at the three-hundred-thousand-dollar-prize-fund Sinquefield Cup, which begins
July 31st, in St. Louis. Aronian looks likely to make the Candidates
cut, but it’s not guaranteed. Once again, he must sweat over his future.
Though many of the game’s current leaders are in their twenties, history
suggests that Aronian is at an age where his powers should peak;
Petrosian won the world title at thirty-three. Aronian wants to give
Armenia another victory, and help it move on from past sorrows. “I feel
that I’m owing my nation, my country, a lot for their love,” he told me.
Failure, he believes, would not only be a personal but a national
disappointment. “We’re always dreaming our days will come, and some
justice will be delivered,” he said. “I feel that this is my duty.”
"The New Yorker," July 29, 2017
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