Page 68 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

amazing how many hundreds of ho ur s I spen t laboring my way thr ough
Dvoretsky’s chapters, my brain pus hed to the limit, emerging from every study

session utterly exhausted, but inf us ed with a slight ly more nua nc ed
understanding of the outer reaches of ches sic po tential. On the pag e, the man is
a genius.
In life, Dvoretsky is a tall, heavyset man who wears thi ck glasses and rarely

showers or changes his clothes. He is socially awkw ard and when no t talki ng
about or playing chess, he seems like a bi g fi h fl ppi ng on sand. I met
Dvoretsky at the first Kasparov-Karpo v World Cham pi ons hi p match in
Moscow when I was seven years old, and we studi ed toget her spo radi cally

throughout my teens. He would occasional ly live in my family’s ho me for four
or five days at a time when he visited America. Dur ing thes e per iods , it seemed
that every concern but chess was an intrus ive irrelevance. When we were no t
studying, he would sit in his room, staring at ches s positions on his comput er.

At meals, he would mumble whi le dr oppi ng food on the fl or, and in
conversation thick saliva collected at the corner s of his mout h and often sho t
out like streams of glue. If you hav e read Naboko v’s wonder ful no vel The
Defense, about the eccentric chess genius Luzh in—w ell, t hat is Dvoretsky.

When seated at a chessboard, Dvoretsky comes to life. His thi ck fi rs
somehow manipulate the pieces with elegance. He is extremely con nt ,
arrogant in fact. He is most at home across the table from a talent ed pupi l, and
immediately begins setting up enormous ly compl ex ches s compo sitions for the

student to solve. His repertoire of abs trus e material seems limitless, and it
keeps on coming hour after hour in relent less int errogat ion. Dvoretsky loves to
watch gifted chess minds struggle with hi s pr obl ems. He basks in hi s po wer
while young champions are slowly dr ained of thei r audaci ous creativity. As a

student, I found these sessions to be resonan t of Orwell’s prison scene s in 1984,
where independently minded thinker s were rut hl essly br oken do wn unt il all
that was left was a shell of a person.
Training with Yuri Razuvaev feels much more like a spi ritual retreat tha n

an Orwellian nightmare. Razuvaev’s metho d depends upo n a keen appr eciation
for each student’s personality and ches sic predispo sitions . Yur i has an amazing
psychological acumen, and his instruct ional style begins with a close study of
his student’s chess games. In remarkab ly sho rt order, he di scovers the core of

the player’s style and the obstructions that are bl ocking pur e self-expr ession.