Турнир шахматных надежд [The Chess Hopefuls Tournament]

KHENKINE, Victor Lvovitch. Турнир шахматных надежд [The Tournament of Chess Hopes].
Moscow, Molodaïa Gvardia, 1973.

Octavo (202 x 128 mm). 46 pp., (1) f.
Paperback, publisher's illustrated wrappers.

First edition, the only one published, with two signatures of Russian chess grandmasters. The Lothar Schmid copy.
An account of a tournament pitting the established Soviet elite against their juniors: Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky and Bronstein on one side, and on the other the young Anatoly Karpov together with a generation of future grandmasters: Chekhov, Kochiev, Dvoiris, Zaitchik. Two years later, Karpov was world champion.

Viktor Khenkine (1923-2010), a chess master, was at the time one of the leading chess journalists in the USSR: he was a columnist for Moskovsky Komsomolets, editorial secretary of Chakhmatnaia Moskva, then of the Bulletin of the Central Chess Club.

A copy bearing the autograph signatures of Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995), world champion, and of Elisaveta Bykova (1913-1989), women's world champion from 1953 to 1956 and again from 1958 to 1962, one on the verso of the front cover, the other on the title page.

These two names belong to the generation that the book portrays by contrast. Bykova had lost her title in 1962 to Nona Gaprindashvili, twenty-eight years her junior. Botvinnik had relinquished his the following year.

From the library of Lothar Schmid; his ex-libris.