Chess, by Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig’s novella Chess is part caper and part psychological thriller, and suffers from a confusion of ideas and aims. It raises themes of terror and the fear induced by totalitarian government, yet mixes them with a lightweight plot. While Chess is enjoyable enough, the overall result is not entirely satisfactory.

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer who was enormously popular in his day, specialising mostly in shorter fiction and novellas. Fleeing the Nazis, he moved through several countries, ending up in Brazil. Tragically, he and his wife committed suicide there in 1942.

Chess was published posthumously in 1942, and is an eighty-page novella. It central theme seems to deal with how people cope mentally with psychologically demanding situations. In a more superficial sense, the novella deals with obsessions that can lead to madness.

The Obsessions of Dr B.

The story is set on a steam ship that is travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. One of the passengers is the world famous chess master Mirko Czentovic, a young South Slavonian who is a bit of an idiot savant. The narrator of the story meets a Scotsman, a Mr McConnor on board, and talks him into playing a game of chess with him, this in the hope that Mirko will notice and can then be persuaded into a match. This is achieved, and when Mr McConnor is playing a mysterious stranger turns up on the scene and starts giving instructions on how to check mate Mirko.

The story then takes a turn and the reader is given a lengthy autobiography of the mysterious man, given the name of Dr. B. (Anyone familiar with Zweig’s fiction will know that absorbing digressions are the author’s speciality, seducing the reader with carefully built up character portraits.)

Dr B’s history involved the running of a legal practice that helped protect the assets of the rich from Nazi confiscation. Dr B. is eventually captured by the Nazies and interrogated for months on end. Being cooped up in a room all the time nearly drives him mad, and Dr. B is ecstatic when he discovers that one of the soldier’s has a book in his coat pocket, which he manages to purloin. Having done so, he looks forward to the pleasure of being able to read a book. Yet the book turns out to be a bland step-by-step guide to winning at chess. To avoid insanity, and keep his mind occupied, he starts to learn all the example games of chess outlined in the book off by heart. Then he starts to play against himself, in his mind. This all turns into a bewildering obsession that occupies all his waking hours. Hence his brilliance at playing chess, and his ability to prove a real match for Mirko Czentovic.

Problems with Stefan Zweig’s Chess

Chess is not entirely successful as a psychological thriller. It reads more like an intellectual idea parlayed into a novella. While there are some aspects of Dr B’s portrait that have an authentic ring – his need to read a book, the survivalist instinct to occupy his mind with something to avoid going mad – the novella doesn’t go far enough in exploring Dr B’s predicament. Zweig seems to be opening up one theme, only to bring the story back to the novelty idea of a chess player who has sent himself insane.

Dostoyevsky immediately comes to mind after having read Chess, who was a master of psychological extremes. In one novel Dostoyevsky discussed what it was like to have a death sentence hang over your head because of your political sympathies. I don’t know if Zweig was ever detained or questioned by the Nazis, but you can sense his fear and anxiety at such a prospect in Chess. For me, it seemed the story was missing some deeper theme. You introduce the Nazis and a long period of detention and questioning, and it seems the themes are greatly enlarged. Yet Chess ends with Dr B. modestly declaring that he has allowed himself to get too obsessed in his game against Mirko, and that he must check himself in future against any such outbursts of wild enthusiasm.

In this novella, it seemed that Zweig had a few ideas that he wanted to juggle in the one story, and rather coarsely welded them together into a story that is at once a bit of a caper and a psychological thriller.

Chess, by Stefan Zweig. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 978-0-141-19630-5