Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

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.

I possessed with those 150 championship games a wondrous weapon against the oppressive monotony of space and time.

But don't forget that I had been snatched by force out of all normality, a prisoner, unjustly locked up, tortured by loneliness for months in a most sophisticated way, a person who had wanted to vent his accumulated rage on something for a long time.