Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

libretto

bourgeois

cogent

imperturbably

promenade deck

bargeman,

parson

He obediently did what was asked, carried water, split wood, helped in the fields, cleaned the kitchen, and reliably (though with annoying slowness) finished any task he was given. But what irritated the good parson most about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless specifically told to, never asked a question, did not play with other boys, and undertook no activity that had not been explicitly assigned to him; once Mirko had finished his chores, he sat around listlessly indoors with the vacant look of sheep at pasture, taking not the slightest interest in what went on around him.

somnolent

The most audacious grandmasters, every one of them infinitely superior to him in intellectual gifts, imagination, and daring, fell to his cold and inexorable logic as Napoleon to the ponderous Kutuzov or Hannibal to Fabius Cunctator (who, according to Livy’s report, displayed similar conspicuous traits of phlegm and imbecility in childhood).

cravat

Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had no sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

wily

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end? Any child can learn its basic rules, any amateur can try his hand at it; and yet, within the inalterable confines of a chessboard, masters unlike any others evolve, people with a talent for chess and chess alone, special geniuses whose gifts of imagination, patience and skill are just as precisely apportioned as those of mathematicians, poets, and musicians, but differently arranged and combined.

In principle I have always found it easy to understand that such a unique, ingenious game would have to produce its own wizards. Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess book—someone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!

avarice

But finally I remembered a hunter’s trick, that the most reliable technique for decoying the wood grouse was to imitate its mating call. What could be more effective in attracting the attention of a chess champion than to play chess oneself?

Mr. McConnor was one of those self-obsessed big wheels who feel personally diminished by a defeat in even the most trivial game. Accustomed to ruthlessly asserting himself in life and spoiled by actual success, this un-yielding self-made man was so unshakably imbued with a sense of his own superiority that any resistance infuriated him, as though it were some inadmissible revolt, practically an affront. When he lost the first game, he grew sullen and began proclaiming, dictatorially and longwindedly, that this could only have happened because his attention had wandered for a moment; he blamed his failure in the third game on noise from the next room. He was unable to lose without immediately demanding a return match. At first I was amused by this dogged pride;

appraising

impassive.

supernumeraries).

avowal

pallor

prudence

inconspicuousness

But, after all, didn’t Hitler and his bunch insidiously outmaneuver even the greatest diplomats and military men? Just

Schuschnigg

They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

hermetically

But even thoughts, insubstantial as they seem, need a footing, or they begin to spin, to run in frenzied circles; they can’t bear nothingness either.

allay

At first I played the games through quite mechanically; yet gradually a pleasurable, aesthetic understanding awoke within me. I grasped the fine points, the perils and rigors of attack and defense, the technique of thinking ahead, planning moves and countermoves, and soon I was able to recognize the personality and style of each of the chess masters as unmistakably as one knows a poet from only a few of his lines; what had begun as no more than a way to pass the time was becoming a pleasure, and the figures of the great chess strategists—Alekhine, Lasker, Bogoljubov, Tartakower, and the rest—became beloved companions in my solitude.

Each day my silent cell was filled with ceaseless novelty, and the very regularity of my exercitia restored the acuity of my intellectual faculties: I felt my mind refreshed, even honed, so to speak, by the constant mental discipline.

playing chess against oneself is thus as paradoxical as jumping over one’s own shadow.

My awful situation was forcing me to at least try to divide myself into a Black Me and a White Me in order not to be crushed by the horrendous nothingness around me.”

apparently there are hidden regulatory forces at work within us which automatically shut off anything that might become psychologically troublesome or dangerous.

homo obscurissimus

Suddenly there was something new between the two of them: a dangerous tension, a passionate hatred. They were no longer opponents testing their abilities in a spirit of play, but enemies resolved to annihilate each other.