GRANDMASTERS are getting extraordinary recognition these days:

Veselin Topalov, who won the world chess federation (FIDE) championship in 2005, received Bulgaria’s “Sportsman of the Year” award from President Georgi Purvanov.

And the Armenian government allotted 5 million drams (that’s $11,000 in real money) to Levon Aronian for winning the just-completed FIDE World Cup.

While Topalov has been a star for a decade, few chess fans had ever heard of Aronian, 23, before he leaped to No. 12 on the world rating last fall.

He’s the son of a Belarussian physicist and an Armenian mother and emigrated with the family from Erevan to Berlin three years ago.

Aronian grew up on the sharp games of Denmark’s Bent Larsen (“When I lose, I lose in the Larsen style”) but later developed a fondness for the dry maneuvering of Armenia’s gift to chess, Tigran Petrosian.

He’s one of the new generation of grandmasters from the former U.S.S.R. who have only a tenuous link to the “Soviet School of Chess.” He’s so Westernized that he’s seen more than 40 films of his favorite movie director, Alfred Hitchcock.

Aronian’s biggest test comes later this month at Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands, where he meets players like Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik. “That will be judgment day for me,” he told a recent interviewer.