Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

He travelled from town to town, always staying in the cheapest hotels, he played in the lowliest clubs (as long as they paid his fee), he let his photo be used in soap commercials and even, without heeding the derision of his rivals, who knew full well that he couldn't string three written sentences together correctly, sold his name for use as the author of “A Philosophy of Chess,” which had in reality been penned by a young Galician student at the behest of an enterprising publishing house. 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.

“For how could such rapid fame fail to turn such an empty head?”

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.

I well knew from my own experience the mysterious allure of the “royal game” which, alone among the games devised by man, stands above the tyrannical vicissitudes of luck and awards its victory laurels solely on the basis of intellect, or rather a specific kind of intellectual endowment.

But isn't one guilty of insultingly diminishing chess by even calling it a game? Isn't it also a science, an art form, floating between those categories as the coffin of Mohammed betwixt heaven and earth, a one-off union of all opposing forces: ancient and yet forever new, technical in its layout and yet only operable through imagination, limited by a geometrically rigid space yet unlimited in its combinations, constantly evolving and yet lifeless, cogitation that leads to nothing, art without display, architecture without bricks and despite this, proven in its very being and existence to be more durable than all books and academic works; 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.

In principle I could readily understand how such a delightful game must engender its own unique matadors; but how hard, how impossible it was to imagine the life of any mentally active person for whom the world was reduced to the narrow one-way path from black to white, who looked for his life's victories purely in the moving here and there, back and forth of 32 pieces, a person to whom a new opening move, opting for the knight rather than the pawn, represented a mighty deed and a pitiful speck of immortality in the footnotes of some chess book – a person, an intelligent person, who, without going mad, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years would turn all the horsepower of his brain over and over to the ridiculous exertion of pushing a wooden king towards the corner of a wooden board.

His noticeably broad shoulders, almost athletically emphasized, unfortunately made their presence felt in the game as clues to his character, 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. Used to ruthlessly asserting himself in life, and coddled by worldly success, this giant self-made man was so unshakeably steeped in his own superiority that any resistance struck him as an inappropriate mutiny and almost an offence.