Life itself.

IN ONE of the half dozen or so truthful entries in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, chess is defined as "an art in the form of a game." An art because the human personality expresses itself in the movement of the chess pieces; a game because chess is a struggle between two players-an aesthetic rendering of the survival of the fittest. "Life itself is a kind of chess," wrote Benjamin Franklin in The Morals of Chess.

Of course, if one mentions the word "chess" to most of the 25 million Americans estimated to play the game, they are likely to associate it not with Franklin or with chess experts before him, but with Bobby Fischer. But Fischer dates back only to 1943, while chess goes far back to antiquity.

Some time before 500 A.D. in the north of India, members of royal courts began to shift various objects on a board, each object representing a unit of ancient Indian armies. There were foot-soldiers, cavalry, armed chariots, and, of course, elephants. As in real life, these fighting pieces were commanded by a king and his senior minister, the vizier, which is the queen in the modern game. The Indian game was shatranj, the direct ancestor of chess, and the victor was he who employed the deeper strategies and the more accurate tactics.

For many people, the allure of chess lies in the extraordinary difficulty of employing these deeper strategies and more accurate tactics. The nobles and notables of old Europe spent so many hours hunched over chess boards, lost in the filigree of the game's intricacies, that chess became known as, first, the royal game and later, during the French Enlightenment, as the signature pastime of an era. Robespierre was an ardent coffeehouse chess player, and Andre Philidor, the French composer and favorite of Parisian ladies, was the world's first chess master. In the Age of Reason, the moves of the pieces were like the conclusions of syllogisms.

These days, chess serves as a rich source of military and political metaphors. "The game is wonderful," says Jim Rice, the lyricist for such shows as Evita and the successful London musical, Chess, "because it's politics written small." Karl Marx regarded chess as dialectics practiced on 64 squares and took the game very seriously.

When Marx got into a difficult position," wrote Wilhelm Liebknecht, "he would get angry, and losing a game would cause him to fly into a rage!"

In the Soviet Union, chess players are important enough to get shot-as C. P. Snow once said of Soviet writers. Chess is not only the national game (the USSR chess federation has about five million members), but it is also what Nikolai Krylenko called "a scientific weapon in the battle on the cultural front."

During the 1930s, successful Soviet grandmasters spent much of their time dispatching telegrams to the "Dear beloved teacher and leader" who made their various victories possible. "I sensed behind me the support of my whole country," wrote one grandmaster, "the care of our government and our party and above all that daily care which you, our great leader, have taken and still take."

As the poet Lakhuti put it, "Stalin demands victories!" Or else.

By the mid 1980s, victories were still being demanded, though with Stalin gone there was social space for others to be adulated. Who achieved the expected victories became as important as the victories themselves.

Take, for example, the famous feud between Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov is a young Armenian of Jewish descent, who is today a major figure in the Russian democratic movement. Karpov, a Soviet loyalist whose ideological raiment lacks even the bulky cut of Mikhail Gorbachev's apparat chic, claims that his only loves are Communism and chess. On one occasion, top Soviet leaders meddled so shamelessly on Karpov's behalf that the New York Times commented: "It matters when a country formally accused of non-compliance with arms treaties is credibly charged with fudging even at the clear rules of international chess."

Of all the misconceptions about chess, the most charming is that it is a game dominated by quaint, little old men with pot-bellies, pince-nez, goatees, and bald heads. In truth, chess is a young man's game, requiring tremendous physical endurance. The first match between Kasparov and Karpov back in 1984-85 was called off because Karpov could not continue. Near the end of the match in February 1985, Muscovites were joking that he looked worse than the dying Konstantin Chernenko. Another misconception about chess is that the game is difficult to learn. In fact, twenty minutes with a below-average chess teacher is enough to learn the moves, though for most people twenty years is scarcely long enough to learn to make good moves.

Among chess players, there is a debate over the nature of chess. Richard Reti, a romantic Bohemian, regarded chess as an art; and Jose Capablanca, a phenomenally talented Cuban, supposedly proved it to be a science. The Soviets propagandize chess as a dialectical struggle.

Communists, like broken clocks, do get it right, now and then. Following every move, a new situation arises. Call it a thesis. The requirement is to find the correct antithesis so as to create a victorious synthesis. It is an inward-looking calling that has driven many men crazy, just as it did Luzhin, the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense.

Dialectical struggle. Negation of negation. That's chess.