A Young Grandmaster in Love, Post #153
Mikhail and Gayane Botvinnik, 1935
In his book Fifteen Games and Their Stories, Botvinnik tells of the first time he met his wife, Gayane. She was a ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet; for Westerners, marrying a ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet was like marrying a Playboy centerfold, although much more respectable. Botvinnik had a crucial game to play in a USSR Championship the next day, so he was nervous about that. Worse, he got caught in a thunderstorm and arrived soaking wet.
“Would she care for me?” was his uppermost thought.
Decades later, after two children, a son and a daughter, his death finally did them part.
But here they are, in the springtime of their youth (he is 24, she is 20), with their entire lives ahead of them.
Check out Jorge Drdnak’s Facebook page for many cool Soviet-era chess photos:
© copyright 2022 Edward Yetman, III and Eric B. Yetman All Rights Reserved in all formats, print and electronic.