Travel chess games
Progressively the movement of certa
in pieces is modified and, with a few details, all the really significant rules of the game (in particular the optional advance of the P, the prise en passant, the promotion and the castling) are acquired at the end of the XVth century.
From Spain, the chess scepter passed to Italy (16th and 17th centuries), then to France (18th century), Great Britain and Germany (19th and early 20th century).
Since the Second World War, for men, it has been the almost permanent property of the Soviet Union and then of Russia, whose supremacy, over a period of sixty years, was only really broken by the American Bobby Fischer (1972-1975).
Before the Second World War, the best player in the world, Vera Menchik-Stevenson, was British. From the creation of a women's world championship in 1949 until the disappearance of the USSR, the crowned champions (L. Rudenko, E. Bykova, O. Rubtsova, N. Gaprindashvili, M. Tchibourdanitzé and their rivals, K. Zvorikina, N. Alexandria, N. Iosséliani and E. Akhmilovskaya) were all Soviets. In the following years, players of other origins, such as the Chinese Xie Jun, Zhu Chen, Xuhua, the Hungarian-American Susan Polgar, the Bulgarian Antonoeta Stefanova, would appear.
A list of famous men interested and sometimes passionate about chess would include hundreds of names. We can only quote those of whom we have very good games: J.-J. Rousseau, A. de Musset, Tolstoy, Meyrinck, Lewis Carroll, Lenin, Piatigorsky, D. Oistrakh, S. Prokofiev, M. Duchamp, V. Nabokov, John Paul II.
