ВАЛЬТЕР ТЕВИС (Walter Tevis)
The Queen’s Gambit
Walter Tevis
Copyright
The Queen’s Gambit
Copyright © 1983, 2014 by Walter Tevis
Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, an imprint of the Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group and A. P. Watt Limited for permission to reprint ten lines from “The Long-Legged Fly” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran.
Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats and Anne Yeats. Rights outside of the United States are controlled by A. P. Watt Limited, London. Reprinted by permission.
Cover design by Brad Albright
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795343070
For Eleanora
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
—W. B. YEATS, “Long-legged Fly”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The superb chess of Grandmasters Robert Fischer, Boris Spassky and Anatoly Karpov has been a source of delight to players like myself for years. Since The Queen’s Gambit is a work of fiction, however, it seemed prudent to omit them from the cast of characters, if only to prevent contradiction of the record.
I would like to express my thanks to Joe Ancrile, Fairfield Hoban and Stuart Morden, all excellent players, who helped me with books, magazines and tournament rules. And I was fortunate to have the warm-hearted and diligent help of National Master Bruce Pandolfini in proofreading the text and helping me rid it of errors concerning the game he plays so enviably well.