Chess Story

"Yes. It’s set on a ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. This is also a nested story, or a frame narrative—but if we focus on the central characters, that’s simpler. The reigning chess champion is aboard the ship, and over the course of the voyage some of the passengers become interested in challenging him to a game of chess. He’s reluctant, but eventually they get him to play. And of course he destroys them. He’s a chess champion after all. But at some point an unexpected figure emerges: Dr. B. He starts giving the players advice, and it turns out that he’s a chess prodigy too, but unlike Czentovic, the champion, he’s a total unknown. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but essentially Dr. B has discovered chess while being imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo. Chess becomes an escape from his predicament, and then later a kind of mania. The novella parallels, in some ways, aspects of Zweig’s own life. It was one of the last things he wrote and it was published posthumously. Zweig left Europe in 1940 for New York, then emigrated to Brazil, where not long after he and his wife committed suicide. The main characters in Chess Story represent elements of Zweig’s own experience as well as events in Europe at that time. That’s the backdrop. I’m interested in the blurry line here between fiction and author. And the use of a narrator who is in the middle of but not part of the action. He mostly just relates stories told to him. So there are all these different levels of reality and storytelling. It’s not clear-cut. Both Czentovic and Dr. B have come to chess from places of profound deprivation. Czentovic has a largely empty mind and seems incapable of doing anything else. He is discovered and elevated by his fellow countryman out of chauvinistic pride. There’s something very simple about him, and they think they can ride his talent to nationalist glory. But ultimately they can’t control him. His monomaniacal fixation, the single-minded doggedness that allows him to succeed at chess, makes him ungovernable, refractory. I leave it to readers to decide what—who—he may represent. “We have always lived partly in virtual realities—in the stories and meanings that we invent to make sense of the world” Then you have Dr. B, who discovers an imaginative outlet in chess. He doesn’t have anyone to play with during his imprisonment, so he turns inward, divides his psyche, and plays both sides. This results in a kind of insanity—that of taking two sides, multiple perspectives, into himself. But this madness also amounts to a kind of sophistication: the power of perspective, imagination, nuance. I think of Dr. B as a Zweig figure, who has fled Europe and feels the profound deprivation and loss of the culture he so prized, laid waste to by National Socialism. He discovers an escape in the imagination—Czentovic crucially lacks the imagination to play chess ‘blind’—and his power arises from this self-awareness and reflexivity, his ability to achieve a certain distance on himself. This is the temperament of the artist or thinking person, who insists on nuance and rejects the literally ‘black-and-white’ nature of politics and perhaps society at large. But this is his strength and his weakness. He is able to play both sides—but it drives him mad."