Nicolas Rossolimo - Biography and Chess Career

Biography and Chess Career

Nikolai Spiridonovich Rossolimo (Russian: Николай Спиридонович Россолимо) was born in Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, to Spiridon Rossolimo, a painter and portraitist, and his wife née Ksenia Nikolaevna Skugarevskaya, an aristocratic writer and war correspondent. He was a nephew of the famous Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Grigory Ivanovich Rossolimo. He lived in Moscow during the mid-1920s, and moved to Paris with his Russian mother in 1929.

Having finished second behind former World Champion José Raúl Capablanca in a tournament in Paris in 1938, he won the French Championship in 1948. Moreover he was Paris Champion a record seven times, and drew two matches in 1948 and 1949 with Savielly Tartakower. In 1955 he won the U.S. Open Championship held in Long Beach, California, on tiebreaks ahead of Samuel Reshevsky. The prize was a new Buick automobile.

Rossolimo played for France in the Chess Olympiads of 1950 and 1972, and for the United States in 1958, 1960, and 1966. He was awarded the International Master title in 1950 and the International Grandmaster title in 1953.

In 1952, he moved to the U.S. with his wife Véra and son Alexander to rejoin his mother and Greek father in New York. (After moving to the U.S., his first name was often spelled "Nicholas".) In New York he worked as a waiter, a taxi driver, played the accordion and worked as a singer, and ran a chess studio as well to support himself and his family. The legendary Rossolimo Chess Studio was located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. It was somewhat like a café that served food and drinks, and also sold chess sets and books, but where members of the public – including famous artists such as Marcel Duchamp – could come and play chess with each other, and occasionally play Rossolimo himself for a fee (Rossolimo would play simultaneous chess with many of the patrons).

Rossolimo died of head injuries following a fall down a flight of stairs, just after finishing third in his final event, the 1975 World Open.