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:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Judgments, value judgments concerning life, whether for or against it, can in the end never be true: their only value is as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities. We must reach out and attempt to put our finger on this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be assessed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)