Chess (poem)

Chess 

by Jan Kochanowski
Front page of the 1585 edition
Original title	Szachy
Country	Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Language	Polish
Subject(s)	Chess
Publication date	c. 1565 (1565)

Chess (Polish: Szachy) is a poem written by Jan Kochanowski, first published in 1564 or 1565. Inspired by Marco Girolamo Vida's Scacchia Ludus, it is a narrative poetry work that describes a game of chess between two men, Fiedor and Borzuj, who fight for the right to marry Anna, princess of Denmark. The poem anthropomorphises the pieces, presenting the game as a battle between two armies, in a style reminiscent of battle scenes in the works of Homer and Virgil.

In 1912, Alexander Wagner reconstructed the game described in the poem, while Yuri Averbakh found that it has three possible endings in 1967.

During his visit to the Italian lands in 1558–59, Jan Kochanowski encountered Scacchia Ludus, a poem by Marco Girolamo Vida, which describes a game of chess played on Mount Olympus between Apollo and Mercury. It is possible that Kochanowski also met Vida himself. Inspired by Scacchia Ludus, Kochanowski decided to create his own poem with a chess game as the main topic.

Until the second half of the 19th century, Chess was often thought to be only a paraphrase of Vida's poem, rather than an independent work. In his 1856 essay Chess in Poland (Polish: Szachy w Polszcze), historian Maurycy Dzieduszycki proved that Kochanowski's poem, while inspired by Scacchia Ludus, is dependent on it only to a small extent and should be considered a fully separate work of art.