The sun had burned through the morning fog in Malibu earlier than usual, but Garry Kasparov ignored it. The world chess champion stabbed with a fork at his breakfast of raw onion and cold turkey.

Kasparov ate mechanically, his eyes fixed on a large-screen television for the latest news of the sweeping changes overtaking the Soviet Union.

This past month in Malibu was supposed to have provided Kasparov a vacation from such political distractions and an opportunity to spend more time on his chess game. But on this morning last week, the chairs at his chess table, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, were empty.

"How can you spend more time on chess when so much has happened?" he asked in an impassioned voice.

To the outside world, Kasparov is known as the world chess champion from the Soviet Union. But Kasparov, an outspoken democratic activist, lately has introduced himself as the champion from Russia, a prophetic distinction. And now, as the independence movement among Soviet republics demonstrates that his anti-Soviet instincts were shared by millions of his countrymen, Kasparov cannot stop thinking, and talking, about the current turmoil.

The intense, wiry 28-year-old has rented, for $40,000 a month, the sprawling clifftop home where Madonna married Sean Penn amid frenzied media coverage six years ago. Johnny Carson lives next door. But such trappings have been only a passing curiosity to Kasparov. He is more interested in the house's television, fax machine and telephone--his links to the homeland.

"Every day I have information from my friends, they give me background," he said. "But you should be there, to touch it."

As his country seems in flux since the attempted coup, so Kasparov also seems in transition, at the edge of personal and public decisions regarding his future in chess, business and politics.

Kasparov, born in the republic of Azerbaijan of Armenian and Jewish ancestry, was a child chess prodigy and world champion by age 22. In the chess world, he is considered egotistical, temperamental, a man who sees the world in black and white. He describes himself as "uncompromising," a man with a "sense of being exceptional," and "unable to do anything by halves."

Now perhaps the future is not so clear. For the first time in 10 years of winning, Kasparov finished second and third this spring in tournaments held in Spain and Holland. Some wondered whether Kasparov would retain his hold on the game at the next world championship match, in 1993, and speculated the champion's obsession with politics was responsible for his stumbles.