Art & Creativity Quote by Vladimir Kramnik

Kramnik’s line is a quiet rebuttal to the way chess gets sold: as cold calculation, monkish discipline, a sport for people who enjoy suffering. Coming from a former world champion, it lands because it smuggles intimacy into a domain that’s usually narrated in terms of engines, ratings, and “best play.” He’s not arguing that chess is art in some museum-grade, mystical sense; he’s insisting that the player’s inner life is visible on the board the way it’s visible in a painting or a piece of music.

The phrasing matters. “For me” narrows the claim to lived experience, dodging the endless, sterile debate about whether chess objectively qualifies as art. “Closely related” doesn’t mean identical; it means adjacent practices with a shared payoff: beauty and expression. That’s a loaded pairing. Beauty nods to form - harmony, proportion, surprise. Expression points to identity: the fingerprints in your choices, the taste you develop for risk, clarity, complication, restraint. In chess, you can’t improvise outside the rules, so expression happens through selection: which lines you trust, which positions you steer toward, what you’re willing to concede to get what you want.

Context sharpens the subtext. Kramnik’s era sits at the hinge between romantic mythology and machine-assisted modernity. When computers start mapping “truth,” a human champion has to defend what’s still human about the game. This quote is that defense: even under perfect constraints, the self still leaks through - not as confession, but as style.