She also initially believes that there is no way to evade white's mate, but subsequently notices a chance for black. Later Anna, who would rather marry Fiedor, visits the room with the chessboard, guarded for the night. The sun sets with black still not making any move and it is decided that the players will stop the game for the night, to resume on the following day. Fiedor sees no way to evade his loss and makes no move, despite urging comments from Borzuj and advice to resign from members of Tarses' court who watch the game. The match progresses to a position which seems to end with white inevitably mating in its next move (see the diagram). The play advances into the endgame and Borzuj indeed promotes and gets a new queen. When both queens are killed, the kings are said to look for new wives among their servants – a metaphor of pawn promotion. illegally put a captured piece on the board. At one point, Borzuj attempts to "resurrect" a dead knight, i.e. The play is described metaphorically: Captures are referred to as killings, the pieces are said to have emotions. Kochanowski uses the names of the pieces (which are often different from their equivalents in modern Polish) in literal sense, describing the game as a war between infantry soldiers ( pawns), knights, bow-wielding priests ( bishops), war elephants ( rooks), queens and kings. The game, described as a battle of anthropomorphised pieces starts, comprising the biggest part of the poem. Fiedor and Borzuj learn the rules and after spending some time training, meet in Tarses' palace for the game.īorzuj is chosen to play white and Fiedor black. After the two men proclaim that they want to have a duel, Tarses proposes a game of chess instead. Of the many foreigners who wanted to marry her, two men, Fiedor and Borzuj, stood out as the most interested. Tarses, the king of Denmark, has a daughter named Anna. Ĭhess is dedicated to " Jan Krzysztof, count of Tarnów, castellan of Wojnicz."Īccording to Wagner's reconstruction, the match was stopped for the night following 75. In his 1856 essay Chess in Poland ( Polish: Szachy w Polszcze), historian Maurycy Dzieduszycki proved that Kochanowski's poem, while inspired by Scacchia Ludus, is dependent on it only to a small extent and should be considered a fully separate work of art. Until the second half of the 19th century, Chess was often thought to be only a paraphrase of Vida's poem, rather than an independent work. Inspired by Scacchia Ludus, Kochanowski decided to create his own poem with a chess game as the main topic. It is possible that Kochanowski also met Vida himself. In 1912, Alexander Wagner reconstructed the game described in the poem, while Yuri Averbakh found that it has three possible endings in 1967.ĭuring his visit to the Italian lands in 1558–59, Jan Kochanowski encountered Scacchia Ludus, a poem by Marco Girolamo Vida, which describes a game of chess played on Mount Olympus between Apollo and Mercury. The poem anthropomorphises the pieces, presenting the game as a battle between two armies, in a style reminiscent of battle scenes in the works of Homer and Virgil. Inspired by Marco Girolamo Vida's Scacchia Ludus, it is a narrative poetry work that describes a game of chess between two men, Fiedor and Borzuj, who fight for the right to marry Anna, princess of Denmark. Chess ( Polish: Száchy) is a poem written by Jan Kochanowski, first published in 1564 or 1565.
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