Maciek's Reviews > Chess Story

Chess Story (also known as The Royal Game is Stefan Zweig's final novella, published posthumously in 1942. Zweig took his own life because of Hitler's rise to power and annexation of his native Austria, and his last work can be seen as a poignant farewell both to his lost country and the world of yesterday.

Chess Story uses Zweig's favorite frame technique - his first person narrator is an unnamed man aboard the steamship from Buenos Aires to New York, reflecting Zweig's own personal journey. But the narrator is not the true protagonist of the story - Zweigh merely uses him as a device to observe and analyze two other men aboard the ship.

Mirko Czentovic is a chess prodigy who became the world champion: although he grew up as a poor Yugoslav boy without any formal schooling, he self-taught himself to play chess by observing hundreds of games played by his carers. Although Czentovic lacks skill at anything else, he truly excels at chess, and entertains himself with playing with other passengers on the deck. The narrator observes how no one is able to beat Czentovic or even force him into a draw, until one game is interrupted by another passenger - a stranger who advises against what would seem to be an obvious move; he explains his tactic to the player, and with his advice the game ends in a draw. Intrigued, the narrator seeks out the mysterious stranger, a Dr B., who tells him his story.

The key point of the novella is the chess match between Czentovic and Dr B. - an Austrian lawyer persecuted by the Nazis, and their approach to the game. For Dr B. chess is a way of holding on to life - his story is clearly meant to be more complex and tragic, reflecting the author's own experience of an exile who lost everything. Czentovic is meant to be the inscrutable, towering oppressor, which is how Zweig saw Nazism - inhuman and incapable of empathy. Like the system he embodies, Czentovic only looks at his opponent's humanity when to see a weakness that can be used to overcome him - he is entirely driven by a desire to win and conquer, and plays chess like an unstoppable, dark force. The fact that Stefan Zweig took his life days after mailing the final typescript of this novella to his publisher makes it especially hard to not see his own despair at the tragedy which was sweeping the world at that time; even though he was far removed from these horrors they claimed him as well.

Chess Story has been re-relased with a new introduction by the NYRB; Pushkin Press has released The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, an ample volume of Zweig's fictions which I also read and reviewed here.