Re:View - Stefan Zweig's 'Chess' (1941)

The Royal Game. The Game of Kings. Chaturanga. Shatranj. Échecs. Chess has gone by many names in its centuries-long history. The endless battle between the armies of white and black has ensnared the collective imagination of mankind for generations. It’s a staggering feat of intellectual ingenuity, worthy of appreciation even in loss. No cry has so transcended the cultural barriers as the one of “Checkmate!”. They say that chess is life itself, that the perpetual struggle for supremacy in those discrete 64 squares reflect the intricate, underhanded subterfuge of business and politics, the logical exactitude of science, the dogged persistence of sport, and the poetic flair of art. White and Black are the two sides of man’s own psyche. Indeed, after any prolonged period of play, one finds it almost impossible not to dream in the bishop’s diagonal snipes, the queens omni-positional control, the unbreakable pawn storm in the centre. The game’s obsessive pull is strong, and totally consuming. Most are familiar with the Bobby Fischer story, a mind so engulfed in the overwhelming tactical possibility of the Chessboard that he soon began to drown in real-life paranoia over the Soviets and the Jews; it was as if the King in the centre of the board was his own soul manifest, every check a stab to his heart. It’s said the game drove him to the edge of insanity. In reality, his mental decline was probably more complex, though the legend of chess exposing the dark side to his gift casts a long shadow.

Bobby Fischer (Right) flummoxed during his famous 1972 bid to become World Chess Champion against Boris Spassky.

Stefan Zweig was not a professional chess player by trade, in spite of his evidently excellent theoretical knowledge. He was a writer, and if his 1942 novella, Chess, (Also called The Royal Game in some editions), is anything to go by, he was an excellent one. Born to a comfortable upper-class Austrian-Jewish mercantile and banking family in 1881, Zweig studied Philosophy in Vienna before pursuing a literary career and traversing the western hemisphere, from New Haven, to Rio de Janeiro. Chess was written in the last years of his life, before he and his wife committed suicide together in their home, from a barbiturate overdose.

Chess tells a story perfect for the novella form; Zweig’s taught plotting and perfectly paced prose are gripping, eerily reflecting the addictive quality of the game of chess itself. Zweig is mostly known for his psychological approach to character, an attitude which extends to his bestselling biographies of figures such as Honoré de Balzac and Marie Antoinette. This is unsurprising, given he was living the same Germanic intellectual culture that bred psychoanalysts of the Freudian and Jungian ilk. Zweig’s literary philosophy runs unfettered in Chess, a tale of the interplay between madness and genius, intellect and pride, depicted with sparkling imagination against the rich historical backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Austria, a real-life event which uprooted Zweig from his homeland, and propels the story forward with palpable atmospheric tension.

Clearly our boi was a SteFAN of the Hard Day's Night album cover.

Our unnamed narrator is on a transatlantic Ocean liner from New York to Buenos Aires, whereon the world Chess Champion, Mirko Czentovic, whose humble origins and brusque manner foster much speculation of his mind’s inner workings, is a fellow traveller. The narrator’s natural curiosity urges him to play a game against the famed sportsman. With a combination of money, and luck, he manages to lure Czentovic to play a game against him and other casual chess players aboard the ship. Initially, they are annihilated on the board, Czentovic’s prowess all too obvious. However, during their second game, as inevitable defeat looms ominously, a mysterious stranger begins to whisper moves to them, the calculation behind which astonishes the narrator and his teammates. Perfect play, sheer flawless defence. They manage to draw against the world chess champion in what was ostensibly a hopeless position. Yet as soon as they wish to celebrate such a success with their prodigious new friend, he slips quietly away. His gift for the game, it turns out, belies an incredibly dark secret.

There isn’t much to the plot of Chess, but what's here is excellent, and Zweig’s writing is scrumptious, with achingly evocative descriptive choices that never drag. There is not a dull sentence in this novella; it moves at a thoughtful clip. One could feast on this prose for hours, the craftsmanship is that superb. Credit must be given to the translation by Anthea Bell, which communicates even the subtlest of linguistic flourishes: “the belligerent thrust of his chin”, “sharply cut features”, “a hopelessly grotesque and almost comic figure”. It is simply a joy to read, despite its dark undertones, so joyful one becomes envious of Zweig’s almost preternatural gift for rendering even the dullest scenarios engrossingly readable. As mentioned before, Zweig is a writer primarily concerned with the intricacies of the human mind, and he puts forth some fascinating dissections of characters in various states of mental activity and distress; self-imposed schizophrenia, the paradox of artless talent, the intellectual desperation of man as a species. The novella’s shortened length just teases the reader into contemplating these bountiful themes for themselves, without devolving into a psychological treatise. Zweig sagely shies away from providing any concrete answers to the questions he poses.

Anya Taylor-Joy in 'The Queen's Gambit' (2020), another cautionary tale of madness and genius with chess at its centre.

As a subject matter, chess lends itself beautifully to the novella’s ideas surrounding the dichotomy of human excellence and derangement. For, on the one hand, Chess is considered to be at the pinnacle of man’s joint cultural and scientific achievements, the perfect union of the two hemispheres of man’s inner life, of the human brain, yet simultaneously, Zweig manages to presage the public fascination with Bobby Fischer’s descent into uncontrollable antisocial irascibility. It’s simply an intoxicating mix, reflected perfectly in Zweig’s clean character work, which balances these ideas wonderfully. The duality of man is played out in the rook lifts by white, the knight forks of black, in pins and discovered attacks, and it’s absolutely thrilling, even if you don’t know your smothered mates from your fianchettoed pawns. The conflict of man with the more insidious sides of himself, his intrinsic duality, if you will, takes place on the 64-square battlefield, physically represented yet existing almost entirely on the mental plane, both in space and not. “The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it”, as Aron Nimzowitsch so eloquently put it. The economical characterisation of Czentovic and the stranger gives a mythic sense to the story, the adjective I prize above almost all others in art and literature.

Unfortunately, for the incredible build up Zweig achieves, and the ingenious climax to the story, the denouement seems comparatively weak. If the preceding pages weren’t so unbelievably good, this resolution would be perfectly adequate, yet it’s impossible not to feel that the novella ends with a whimper, rather than the dramatic bang foregrounded by the drama of the prior revelations. As it stands, Zweig’s work is an outstandingly well-written cautionary meditation on the nature of human consciousness, its hidden recesses, and potential for either triumph or tragedy. Must see TV.