Vasily Panov: Forty Years at the Board

Vasily Nikolaevich Panov (1906–1973) was a Soviet chess player, an International Master from 1950, and a well-known chess author. He grew up in the chess milieu of Moscow and by the late 1920s had joined the group of the city’s strongest players, winning the 1929 Moscow Championship and regularly finishing among the prize-winners in city and all-Union tournaments. His autobiographical book Forty Years at the Chessboard was published for his sixtieth birthday and established his image as one of the characteristic figures of the mid‑century Soviet chess movement.

As a player, Panov combined practical strength with deep opening understanding. Specialist literature notes his contributions to the theory of a wide range of systems, including the attacking setup against the Caro–Kann Defence (known as the Panov–Botvinnik Attack) and essential ideas in the Sicilian Defence, the Ruy Lopez, and the Alekhine and Benoni Defences. In the biographical collection edited by Yakov Estrin, his games are presented as examples of energetic, attacking play in which positional pressure naturally grows into combinational play.

In parallel with his tournament career, Panov became one of the leading authors in the Soviet chess press and later moved on to major book projects. Bibliographic and library sources single out his textbook Chess for Beginners, the comprehensive reference work Course of Openings, and his books on the games of Alekhine, Capablanca, and Chigorin, which for decades served as core literature for many Soviet chess players, including the young Anatoly Karpov. The biographical collection Vasily Panov (compiled by Y. Estrin) brings together his articles, games, and the reminiscences of contemporaries, emphasizing the scale of his influence as a theorist, journalist, and popularizer of chess culture.

Sources

https://publ.lib.ru/publib.html

A couple of his books (see pics) and turn phone upside down