Renowned as the work is, still not
so many chess players below top level have actually read it, and
this fact partly goes back to the circumstance that the earliest editions were
anything but easy to read,
which is true for both the five original Lieferungen published by Verlag Kagan in
1925-27, and the earliest
translations into English (using the descriptive notation), and also the 1958
and 1965 German editions.
Apart from their very rich contents those editions were not up to normal standards as far
as printing
and layout were concerned, and it must be admitted that from a linguistic point of view
Nimzowitsch's
usage has an awkward idiosyncrasy.
to read the book only once.
However, in recent years new and
typographically modernised editions have been published, both in
the original language and in translations into various
other languages.
As
can be seen from the articles under the headline Nimzowitsch and his contemporaries
the first
reactions were not very enthusiastic, to put it mildly.
Tarrasch was
explicitly hostile, and never changed his opinion. Stahlberg was sceptical to
begin with,
but in his books in the 1950s he writes that "time proved Nimzowitsch
right".
It is easy in
retrospect to point to certain passages in Nimzowitsch's work that could have
been written
otherwise, and no doubt, if he had not died too soon he would have rephrased
certain parts of the text
in "Mein System", if the five instalments from 1925-27 should have been put together
into one volume, like
the one that was published in 1958, 23 years after his death, although without
rephrasing.
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