Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

It soon leaked out that this master of chess was, in his private life, incapable of writing a sentence in any language without a spelling mistake, and one of his annoyed peers in the chess world angrily mocked him for “his ignorance applied equally and universally to all subjects.”

As is the case with all those of a tenacious nature, he lacked any sense of the ridiculous; since winning the world championship he took himself for the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all those bright, intellectual, brilliant orators and writers at their own game and, above all, the palpable fact that he earned more than they did, transformed his erstwhile diffidence into a cold pride, displayed for the most part crassly and in public.

This lad knows of only one thing in his walled-off mind, namely that for months he hasn't lost a single game of chess, and since he cannot conceive that there are other things of value in this world of ours apart from chess and money, he has every reason to be pleased with himself.”

All this information from my friend did not fail to arouse intense curiosity on my part. Monomaniacs of any kind, those people fixated by a single idea, have been a source of fascination for me my whole life, for the more a man limits his field of vision, the closer he is, conversely, to the infinite; those very people who seem so remote from the world construct with their own unique material, termite-like, a remarkable and completely unique shorthand for the world itself.

But isn't one guilty of insultingly diminishing chess by even calling it a game?

it is the only game that belongs to all races and all time, and nobody may know which heavenly power gave it to the world to slay boredom, sharpen the senses and capture the soul.

Where is its beginning and where its end? Every child can grasp its basic principles, every dilettante can dabble at it, and yet it is capable within its fixed, tight square of producing a special species of master, bearing no comparison to others, people with a talent solely directed to chess, idiosyncratic geniuses in whom just as precise a proportion of vision, patience and technique is required as in a mathematician, a poet or a musician, merely in a different formula and combination.

for Mr McConnor was one of those self-obsessed top dogs who take a defeat in even the most unimportant game as a belittling of their personal esteem.

His minimum fee is 250 dollars a game.” I laughed. “I never would have thought that shuffling pieces from black to white would be such a remunerative business. Well, I hope you parted on good terms.” But McConnor remained totally serious. “The game is set for tomorrow afternoon at three. Here in the smoking room. I hope he doesn't wipe the floor with us too easily.” “What, you agreed to his 250 dollars?” I exclaimed, quite shocked. “Why not? C'est son métier. If I had a toothache and there happened to be a dentist on board, I wouldn't expect him to extract my tooth for free. The man is quite right to charge the earth. In every field the real experts are also the best businessmen. I'd rather pay in full than have to ask a fellow like Czentovic for special treatment and end up by having to thank him for it. At the end of the day I've lost more than 250 dollars some evenings in my club with no world champion in sight. It's no disgrace for “third class players” to get beaten by a fellow such as Czentovic.”

He was lying on a deck chair, reading. Before I approached, I availed myself of the opportunity to study him.

They did nothing to us – they just put us into total nothingness, for it is known that there is no more element on earth that can exert such pressure on the human soul as nothingness.

One evening it actually reached that stage: feeling that I was suffocating, the guard happened to push my food in to the room; I cried after him abruptly: "Take me to the interrogation! I want to tell it all! I want to testify! I want to tell you where the papers are, where the money is! I'll leave nothing unsaid, nothing!" Luckily he couldn't hear me any more.

I had therefore something new, something different to look at with my starved eyes, and they clawed greedily at every detail.

And the thought passed through me like a shot: steal the book! Perhaps you'll manage it and you can hide it in your cell and then read, read, read, at last be able to read again! That thought, having just entered my head, had an effect like a strong drug: all at once began a booming in my ears and a hammering in my heart, while my hands turned ice cold and seemed to float away from

Luckily the interrogation ended quickly this time and I brought the book back safely to my room – I won't trouble you with the details, for once it slipped perilously from my waistband in the middle of the corridor, and I had to feign a serious coughing fit in order to bend down and push it safely back under my belt. But what was that in comparison to the feeling of stepping back into that hell of mine, at last alone and yet no longer alone!

fantasizing to myself about what kind of book I would most like this bounty to be: above all I wanted a very small font, containing many letters, many, many thin pages, so that it would take me longer to read. And then also I wished for it to be a work that would stretch me intellectually, nothing one-dimensional, nothing simple, but something that one could learn, learn by heart, poems or best of all – what a bold dream! – Goethe or Homer.

But when I attempted to replay a match in full, it was a complete failure, thanks to my ridiculous breadcrumb figurines, half of which I had dipped in dust to make them darker. I got continually confused in those first few days; I had to restart the game from the beginning five, ten, twenty times. But who was there in the world who had as much unused and aimless time as I had, slave to nothingness, and who had such immeasurable willingness and patience at his disposal?

After a further 14 days I was in a position to play effortlessly and by heart (or blind, as the technical term has it) every match in the book; it was then that I first understood what an immeasurable benefit my impudent theft had secured for me. For I had, at a stroke, activity – one without meaning or purpose perhaps, but an activity all the same, which unravelled the nothingness around me.

My day, which otherwise distended like a shapeless jelly, was therefore filled; I was occupied without tiring myself out, since the game of chess has that wonderful quality, by marshalling intellectual energy within a defined arena, of keeping the brain fresh even after the most strenuous thinking, and even sharpening the brain's agility and vigour.

Such double thinking actually requires a complete division of the consciousness as its departure point, a fading in and fading out of the brain circuitry at will as in a technical machine; setting out to play against oneself in chess represents therefore the same sort of paradox as a man jumping over his own shadow.

For one reason alone had the activity exercised such a healing, calming effect on my shattered nerves: namely that the replaying of matches between strangers didn't necessitate the insertion of myself into the game; whether black won or white won, it was all the same to me, for after all it was Alekhine or Bogoljubov wrestling for the championship laurels, while I myself, my mind, my soul enjoyed it purely as a spectacle, as a connoisseur of the turning points and elegancies of those games.

Every interruption was a trial for me, even the 15 minutes when the guard tidied up the cell, the two minutes when he brought me food, was a torture to my feverish impatience; sometimes the dish containing my meal was still untouched by evening time – the game had made me forget to eat.

I stared at the lovely apparition and it must have been a wild, ecstatic gaze, for this new arrival soothed me with an urgent "Calm! Stay calm!" I for my part listened only to her voice; wasn't that a human being talking? Was there really someone left on earth who didn't ask me official questions, didn't torment me? And furthermore, miracle beyond comprehension, a soft, warm, almost tender female voice.

I was strolling through the smoking room quite by chance when I saw your friends sitting at the chessboard; I was rooted to the spot with astonishment and horror. For I had totally forgotten that one can play chess on a real chessboard and with real pieces, that this is a game where two totally different people sit opposite each other in the flesh. I honestly needed a few minutes to recall that what was being played was fundamentally the same game that, in my despair, I had been attempting to play against myself for months on end. To think that the letters and numbers that I employed to aid me during my furious routine were only a substitute for, and a symbol of, those real ivory figures! My surprise that this moving of pieces around a board was the same as my fantasies of imagination is perhaps comparable to that of an astronomer who, by complicated calculations, has worked out the existence of a new planet, and then perceives it in real life as a clear, white, substantial star in the sky.

And that's when that embarrassing incident occurred, when I, forgetting my manners, interfered in your game. But your friend's wrong move wounded me like a knife in the heart. I acted purely instinctively in holding him back, reaching out impulsively, just as one, without pausing for thought, seizes hold of a child who is leaning over a railing. Only later did I realize the sheer lack of etiquette of which my rash self-assertion made me guilty."

Even Czentovic did not keep us waiting as he had the day before and, after the customary allocation of black and white, the greatly anticipated game between this most mysterious of men and the world champion began. It pains me that it was played out only before us thoroughly inexpert observers and the course of the game is therefore as lost to the annals of chess as Beethoven's improvisations on the piano are to the world of music.

Czentovic's pauses for deliberation lengthened; we felt by this that the real battle for dominance was beginning to assert itself. But to be truthful the gradual development of the gameplay was, just as in every real championship game, something of a disappointment for us uninitiates. For the more the pieces interlaced into some strange pattern, the more impenetrable the actual status of the game became.

He stood up abruptly and started to pace up and down in the smoking room, first slowly, then faster and faster. Everyone looked at him with some bewilderment, but nobody was more alarmed than I, for I noticed how his pacing up and down, vehement though it was, always measured the same length; it was as if he, in the middle of this empty room, had come up against an invisible cupboard which made him turn back.