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In 1985, chess great Viktor Korchnoi was persuaded to take on Géza Maróczy. What really set the challenge apart was that the Hungarian grandmaster had died decades earlier. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
When Viktor Korchnoi faced the ghost of grandmaster Géza Maróczy
The chess game began in June 1985, and it finished 47 moves and 92 months later in February 1993. The length of the game, played via correspondence by two grandmasters, was unusual. More unusual, though, was the fact that one of the participants had died 34 years before it began.
The dead grandmaster was the Hungarian Géza Maróczy, 1870-1951. He played white. His living opponent was Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet-exile born in Leningrad in 1931. I suppose Maróczy’s flesh-wrapped proxy should be named here too: the psychic medium Robert Rollans, without which our late Hungarian would have been haplessly mute.
Viktor Korchnoi learnt chess from his father when he was about six, just a few years before the Germans came in “that terrible year” of 1941. Stalin was famously complacent about a Nazi invasion, and privately indifferent to Russia’s second-largest city; by September 1941, three months into the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union, barely half a million Leningraders had been evacuated from the city.
Hitler didn’t want to occupy Leningrad, only to choke it to death. Its railway lines were cut, its food depots bombed. Food was brutally rationed and there was little fuel for domestic fires. The city became isolated and its occupants starved and froze to death. There was cannibalism and the murderous theft of ration cards.
The city of Leningrad became known then as “the island” and the winter of 1941-42 as “the Season of Death”. For good reason: between 1.6 million and two million people died during the blockade of the city – about 800,000 of them civilians – which amounted to about half of the prewar population.
It was here that one of the great Russian chess players, as a boy, wrapped his grandmother’s body in a sheet, placed it on his sleigh and dragged it through the bomb-cratered snow to the cemetery.
He was 10, and his father was already dead – killed quickly at the front. His father had taught Russian literature, mended fridges, worked in a lolly factory. He was an impoverished renaissance man in Stalin’s first five-year plan, then deployed as his master’s cannon fodder.
During the Season of Death, the young Korchnoi lived in a large communal apartment and learnt things we’d prefer children not to learn. When relatives died, often of starvation, their ration cards might be used, provided their deaths were obscured from authorities. In Leningrad this winter, there was a grim and unforgiving economy. “The dead lent the living a helping hand,” Korchnoi would later write in his memoir.
Viktor Korchnoi was a bright and wilful young man. Later, chess rivals would call him “prickly”, then “egomaniacal”, then much worse. In 1976, he defected from the Soviet Union – not as a matter of ideological revulsion but because he thought the state was sabotaging his career.
Chess can get spooky, or at least it did during the Cold War. Its symbolic value had a way of combining with the ambient paranoia and the singular eccentricities of its famed masters. And so Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, took great interest in Bobby Fischer’s contest of the world title against Boris Spassky in 1972 – the “Match of the Century” – while Fischer swept his Reykjavík hotel room for bugs.
In 1978, when Viktor Korchnoi met Anatoly Karpov in the Philippines for the world title, Korchnoi was persona non grata. He had defected two years earlier and the Soviet press refused to even mention his name – he was referred to only as “the opponent”.
Karpov’s team employed a hypnotist, who sat in the front row attempting to mesmerise the traitor, while Korchnoi wore mirrored sunglasses to protect himself against the gaze.
Before the first game, weeks were spent negotiating the flag under which Korchnoi would compete. The Soviets demanded a white flag with the word “stateless” written on it; Korchnoi wanted the flag of his new home, Switzerland. When that was rejected, his counteroffer was the Soviet flag, upon which the words “I escaped” would be imposed.
In the end, Korchnoi had no flag fixed to the chessboard table but, before he could sit down to begin the first game, his chair had to be X-rayed – his opponent demanded this inspection in order to weed out any electronic devices that might have been smuggled inside it.
Chess was heavy during the Cold War. It was also culturally significant and widely reported upon, and Korchnoi took the opportunity to release an open letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev imploring him to allow his wife and son to leave. “I invoke your mercy, Mr Chairman,” he wrote. “I beg you to show compassion for two citizens of the USSR whose life, by decree of fate, is no longer bound to the life of Soviet society. Permit them to leave the Soviet Union.”
Korchnoi narrowly lost this tournament for the world title, 5-6. Later, Garry Kasparov – a Russian exile himself – would think Korchnoi the best player to have never claimed the world crown.
Perhaps the Korchnoi versus Maróczy/Rollans spirit game doesn’t seem so strange now? The game/experiment/fraud was the idea of one Wolfgang Eisenbeiss, about whom little is known, other than he was a Swiss man with a doctorate in economics and a great passion for chess and the paranormal. He employed the psychic Robert Rollans, an American of even greater obscurity than Eisenbeiss, and convinced Korchnoi to indulge them.
Having contacted the late Maróczy, Rollans would feel periodic “tingles” – a sure sign the dead grandmaster wanted to chat or propose his next move. Rollans, almost always alone, would enter a trance and commit to paper the instructions of his dead master. Then, he would send this to Eisenbeiss, who in turn passed it on to Korchnoi. And so it went for almost eight years.
Not quite laboratory conditions then, but the game is nonetheless celebrated among a passionate fringe as evidence for the survival of consciousness after death.
In 2007, Vernon Neppe – a “consciousness researcher” and brave cosmic voyager – published the brilliantly titled “A Detailed Analysis of an Important Chess Game: Revisiting Maróczy versus Korchnoi” in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.
With the help of a chess professional, Neppe crunched the numbers. It was almost certain: “This case appears to be one of the most remarkable cases supporting evidence for survival of an intelligent component of human existence after bodily death,” he wrote. “It is particularly relevant because of its possibly unique element of combining both a controlled analysis of a skill with that of the detailed confirmation of the correctness of information that was very difficult to locate.”
Now, the curious dilettante, enslaved by earthly scepticism, might question why such astonishing proofs of posthumous consciousness were so poorly recorded or failed so often to find independent witness. They may also ask why Maróczy’s ghostly communications were reserved almost exclusively for a chess game and never digressed, for example, into expressions of love for his surviving children, nor gratuitous pranking.
A hundred other questions might also occur to the dull-minded sceptic, like: why did the ghost’s responses typically take 10 days to manifest in the trembling hand of our semi-divine stenographer? Were there any problems of translation between the Hungarian spectre and his American medium? And was it extreme modesty that condemned a man possessed of supernatural gifts to such obscurity?
Alas, we shall never know. Mr Robert Rollans, medium for the dead, died just three weeks after the completion of the spirit game. Exhausted, I suppose. And if Vernon Neppe, PhD, could not answer these questions, we can still be grateful to him for a paper that refers to Géza Maróczy as the “allegedly dead communicator”.
But, hey – don’t laugh. There’s more to this world than we know, and Viktor Korchnoi, child of Leningrad’s Season of Death, might be forgiven for wanting to commune with ghosts.
Those who conducted this experiment, and those who continue to uphold its importance, reveal something not ethereal but all too human: how infinitely flexible our treatment of information is when we want it to ratify our faith.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "End game".
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