Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig
translated by Joel Rotenberg
1943, reprinted 2005
I heard about Stefan Zweig when he was mentioned as one of the inspirations for the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I suppose is more of a commentary on my reading and movie-watching habits than it is an account of Zweig. But I gather that he was Austrian, writing during the 1930s and 40s, and that his writing often touched on the aspects of life that were negatively affected by Nazism and WWII more generally.
Chess Story is a short novella that takes place on a luxury passenger ship sailing from New York to Argentina. The tale is related by someone who I think of as a Nick Carraway Narrator - someone who is close to the action but only barely takes part in it, and who mostly exists to let us know how interesting the actual protagonists are. This particular narrator doesn't even get a name. His one distinguishing trait is, as he tells us from the beginning, his interest in meeting people with monomaniacal obsessions.
On the same ship is riding the recent world chess champion Czentovic, who caused quite a scandal in the chess world by seeming to come from nowhere, and by being very different from the other, more intellectual chess players. Czentovic's life story is related to the narrator by his friend who read about it in the newspapers, and is a bit starstruck to have a celebrity onboard.
Czentovic was the son of poor farmers and was orphaned as a teenager. He was taken in by the village priest, who tried to educate him, but the boy was a slow learner, and remained illiterate, incurious, and willing to (very slowly) do any task assigned to him without complaint. One day the priest accidentally discovered that the boy was a chess prodigy, so they went into town, then the city, and soon he was winning tournaments across Europe.
On the same ship is riding the recent world chess champion Czentovic, who caused quite a scandal in the chess world by seeming to come from nowhere, and by being very different from the other, more intellectual chess players. Czentovic's life story is related to the narrator by his friend who read about it in the newspapers, and is a bit starstruck to have a celebrity onboard.
Czentovic was the son of poor farmers and was orphaned as a teenager. He was taken in by the village priest, who tried to educate him, but the boy was a slow learner, and remained illiterate, incurious, and willing to (very slowly) do any task assigned to him without complaint. One day the priest accidentally discovered that the boy was a chess prodigy, so they went into town, then the city, and soon he was winning tournaments across Europe.
Because he knows he is seen as dull and dim-witted, Czentovic has made it his policy not to interact with anyone (outside of playing chess) except for other farmers and laborers. The way Zweig describes both Czentovic's play style and his reception in the chess world reminds me of the way that the first computers able to play chess at the master level were received, though of course he was writing like 40 years earlier.
The narrator is curious about what he perceives as the potential monomania of a chess savant who shows no other intellectual gifts. To lure Czentovic out in the open where he can meet him, he starts playing chess with some of the other passengers. My favorite (and the most important, in terms of the story) is a nouveau riche businessman whose expectations of deference and respect go so far as to treat anyone actually playing against him to win as an infuriating insult on his dignity. He is happy to shell out $250 for Czentovic's fee to play against the grand master once the narrator's plan succeeds in drawing him out.
Czentovic plays a match against all the other interested passengers working as one, with the businessman having the final say on moves, of course. During the match, a passenger who hadn't been played before starts offering advice midway through the game, allowing them to force Czentovic to a draw. He readily agrees to a rematch, and the narrator tries to interview this newer, even more mysterious chess prodigy in their midst.
Mystery man B is a fellow Austrian with a supposedly famous last name, which is why the narrator identified him only by his initial. He readily agrees to tell his story, which I think is the longest of the four main scenes in the novella. B used to work as a lawyer and wealth manager, quietly helping the Austrian royal family and several monasteries maintain and hide their property and holdings. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he sicced the Gestapo onto B and others like him in order to confiscate that wealth.
B was imprisoned in a hotel room, in total isolation except for his questionings. He was going crazy from the lack of human contact and intellectual stimulation, but then he managed to steal a book from one of the guards. The book was a collection of the lists of moves of 150 famous chess games. B taught himself to memorize and visualize the games, then began replaying them by rote in his head, then learned to understand them and appreciate them as he recreated them in his mind.
Then he got bored again and tried to play mental chess against himself. This led him to spend every waking and dreaming second trying to split his mind into a black-self and white-self, playing the two halves of his mind against each other, endlessly and furiously, until he essentially did go crazy and was released from the hotel into a hospital. From there he was able to escape Austria, which is how he ended up on the boat.
The narrator doesn't mention it, but in B he actually does find the monomania he was looking for. There's an irony to that, because everyone considers B a dilettante because he's not a professional player. There's also some irony in the fact that the two greatest chess players in the world are playing an anonymous match on a boat, both of them entirely unlike the larger community, one an autodidact facing his first true opponent.
The narrator is curious about what he perceives as the potential monomania of a chess savant who shows no other intellectual gifts. To lure Czentovic out in the open where he can meet him, he starts playing chess with some of the other passengers. My favorite (and the most important, in terms of the story) is a nouveau riche businessman whose expectations of deference and respect go so far as to treat anyone actually playing against him to win as an infuriating insult on his dignity. He is happy to shell out $250 for Czentovic's fee to play against the grand master once the narrator's plan succeeds in drawing him out.
Czentovic plays a match against all the other interested passengers working as one, with the businessman having the final say on moves, of course. During the match, a passenger who hadn't been played before starts offering advice midway through the game, allowing them to force Czentovic to a draw. He readily agrees to a rematch, and the narrator tries to interview this newer, even more mysterious chess prodigy in their midst.
Mystery man B is a fellow Austrian with a supposedly famous last name, which is why the narrator identified him only by his initial. He readily agrees to tell his story, which I think is the longest of the four main scenes in the novella. B used to work as a lawyer and wealth manager, quietly helping the Austrian royal family and several monasteries maintain and hide their property and holdings. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he sicced the Gestapo onto B and others like him in order to confiscate that wealth.
B was imprisoned in a hotel room, in total isolation except for his questionings. He was going crazy from the lack of human contact and intellectual stimulation, but then he managed to steal a book from one of the guards. The book was a collection of the lists of moves of 150 famous chess games. B taught himself to memorize and visualize the games, then began replaying them by rote in his head, then learned to understand them and appreciate them as he recreated them in his mind.
Then he got bored again and tried to play mental chess against himself. This led him to spend every waking and dreaming second trying to split his mind into a black-self and white-self, playing the two halves of his mind against each other, endlessly and furiously, until he essentially did go crazy and was released from the hotel into a hospital. From there he was able to escape Austria, which is how he ended up on the boat.
The narrator doesn't mention it, but in B he actually does find the monomania he was looking for. There's an irony to that, because everyone considers B a dilettante because he's not a professional player. There's also some irony in the fact that the two greatest chess players in the world are playing an anonymous match on a boat, both of them entirely unlike the larger community, one an autodidact facing his first true opponent.
The next day, slow stolid Czentovic plays against manic insatiable B, with results that seem inevitable based on what we have learned so far about their personalities and how each would affect the other.
Chess Story is quite short, but it's dense with detail, and it's told in a very lively fashion. I'm not entirely sure what about Zweig's writing might have inspired Anderson, aside from the general milieu of WWII-era central Europe, although the way the two long origin stories of the main characters are nested within the much briefer frame story of them meeting and then playing against each other, that narrative structure, seems like a possibility. I can see why NYRB liked Zweig enough to reprint him, and I might try to seek out more of his writing another time.
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