Welcome, Bobby Fischer

last updated 8 January 2015

Reykjavic, Iceland

Iceland’s parliament gave Bobby Fischer Icelandic citizenship this week so that the American chess champ can settle in Iceland and avoid U.S. charges. Fischer was arrested in Japan last year. He has been wanted by U.S. authorities since 1992, when he violated an embargo against Yugoslavia by accepting $3 million to play a chess match there. Since then, he had surfaced only in the occasional radio interview, railing against Jews and Americans. But in Iceland, the scene of his famous 1972 defeat of Soviet champ Boris Spassky, he is still seen as a genius and an artist. “He’s like Rembrandt or Mozart, one of these very big people,” Icelandic activist Einar Einarsson told The New York Times, “so his personality is beside the point.”