Later Life
As an ambassador for Russian chess, Chigorin was a shining example; he gave many lectures, wrote magazine articles and chess columns and subsidised or otherwise supported a number of periodicals to keep them afloat despite low readership levels. He also founded a chess club in Saint Petersburg and tried for many years to establish a chess association, an attempt that finally succeeded just a few years after his death.
According to the Canadian International Master Lawrence Day, Chigorin travelled with the young Fedor Bogatyrchuk to Russian events in the 1905-1907 period, helping to train him. After moving to Canada following World War II, Bogatyrchuk then trained Day.
In 1907, Chigorin failed badly in a chess tournament. He was clearly not in good health and was diagnosed by doctors in Carlsbad with an advanced and untreatable case of diabetes. This prompted a prediction that he had only months to live, whereupon he returned to his estranged wife and daughter in Lublin and died the following January. In 1909, a Chigorin Memorial tournament was played in St. Petersburg. After that many more followed: from 1947 onwards mainly in Sochi and from 1990 back in Saint Petersburg.
Read more about this topic: Mikhail Chigorin
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The record of one’s life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.
“I have no name:
“I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
“Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)