Chess Story

  STEFAN ZWEIG (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Berlin and Vienna. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. In addition to this new translation of Schachnovelle, New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels Beware of Pity and The Post-Office Girl, as well as his novella Journey into the Past.

  PETER GAY was born in Berlin in 1923 and emigrated to the United States along with his family as a teenager. He has written many works of social and intellectual history, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, which won the National Book Award, Schnitzler’s Century, and several studies of Freud. He is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.

  CHESS STORY

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  Translated from the German by

  JOEL ROTENBERG

  Introduction by

  PETER GAY

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chess Story

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  STEFAN Zweig was one of Hitler’s posthumous victims. Born in Vienna in November 1881, the son of a rich Jewish textile manufacturer, he began his writer’s life as a poet. His first book was a collection of lyrical verse, Silberne Saiten (Silver Strings, 1901), which taught him that his proper activity lay in the domain of prose. Zweig wrote constantly and easily, in a variety of genres. He translated French literature. In 1935, he wrote the libretto for an opera, Die Schweig-same Frau (The Silent Woman), by Richard Strauss (who after the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal was in desperate search for a new librettist and had no compunction about working with the Jew Zweig). He published biographical profiles both short and long. He wrote novellas and novels. In 1919, after the First World War, he settled in picturesque Salzburg, Mozart’s unloved hometown, writing. In 1935, anticipating the Nazis’ takeover of Austria by three years, he emigrated to England, only to move, in 1940, to Brazil. It was there, in February 1942, that he committed suicide, as did his wife. Zweig left behind, among other works, an unfinished essay on Balzac, an autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), and a novella, Schachnovelle, here translated as Chess Story, both to be published soon after his death. “He died,” wrote the novelist and editor Hermann Kesten, one of the “good” Germans, “like a philosopher.”

  Alive or dead, Stefan Zweig was, and to a significant degree still is, an unfailingly popular writer mainly, but by no means only, in the German-speaking world. The text I have been working with, a Fisher paperback dated December 2004, is in its fifty-second printing, an astonishing record that attests to his lasting appeal. His novellas and biographical essays, the two solid foundations of his enduring reputation, are seductive in their celebrated style, invariably casual and informal in tone, shrewd in their choice of themes, and, in the best sense of the term, conventional.

  Zweig’s last writings were consistent with the work he had been doing for decades. The essay on Balzac is characteristic of him, the last in a substantial series of biographical sketches and historical portraits, in which he tried to nail down the essence of a figure that interested him: Casanova, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hölderlin, Erasmus, and Mary Queen of Scots. They are psychological forays in which Zweig attempted to dig beneath the surface, beyond superficial appearance to inner reality, to intellectual and emotional responses of personages whose political and cultural qualities seemed worth exploring. Their lives led Zweig to place them into, or against, their culture. His Dickens is at home among unfailingly complacent and prudish Victorians, and his Nietzsche is an isolated truth-teller not at home anywhere. We can still read these agreeable essays with pleasure and profit, though Zweig’s strongly felt need to find a dominant trait—reminiscent of his great favorite, Balzac—often makes them more ingenious than precise.

  That this self-confident proceeding was risky emerges plainly from his autobiography, The World of Yesterday. It is chatty and hyperbolic, brilliantly capturing prominent elements in his pre–World War bourgeois culture but setting aside cogent evidence that might contradict, or at least complicate, his generalizations. Thus—to give a telling example— Zweig’s account of young women in respectable Viennese society before 1914 amounts to a single-minded assault on middle-class family life that is quite one-sided. He writes about overprotected maidens who were kept “in a completely sterilized atmosphere,” innocents who became “educated and over-educated,” for the most part “foolish and untaught, well-bred and unsuspecting, inquisitive and shy, uncertain and impractical, and predetermined by this unworldly education to be shaped and led in marriage by their husbands without a will of their own.” To Zweig’s vision, both penetrating but also rather myopic, sex was taboo for unmarried females not only as an activity before marriage but also as a subject of conversation.

  This deplorable state of affairs, to which Zweig chose to devote ample space, could doubtless have been observed among some, perhaps even many, of the young ladies of his acquaintance, but there were other Viennese bourgeoises in his time who worked sturdily toward revising, even eliminating, these attitudes, whether as feminists, university students, or intrepid philanthropists. Of course, when Zweig came to write his autobiography, his liberal culture which he remembered fondly but not uncritically, had been destroyed, and, in retrospect, Zweig saw his past—so distant now!—with a storyteller’s clarity that was overstated for the sake of a literary point. Real life was usually more nuanced than Zweig was ready to acknowledge.

  But in his Chess Story—an effective, terse fiction that is among his most successful—Zweig a little indirectly confronted the horrors of his own time, about which he had long remained silent. Chess, a game however noble—it is not called the “royal game” for nothing—becomes in his hands a double duel: a life-and-death struggle between Mirko Czentovic, the world champion, and an aggressive challenger, an amateur, the moody Scottish engineer, McConnor; more importantly, though, the duel is between Czentovic and a certain Dr. B., an Austrian lawyer of Royalist sympathies, taken prisoner by the Gestapo in March 1938, as the Nazis invaded Austria, and for long months held in solitary confinement while being subjected to relentless interrogation. We learn from the story that by a lucky accident, a chess manual fell into Dr. B’s hands, for a while alleviating the burden of his isolation, and that by playing and replaying chess in his head he mastered the game, only to be driven out of his mind by the strange exercise of functioning as his own opponent. Now released from captivity and allowed to go into exile, Dr. B. retains his striking and strangely acquired competence as a chess player, which turns out to have a crucial bearing on the struggle between Czentovic and McConnor. As usual in Zweig’s fiction, separate strands of a complex plot overlap and blend into one.

  Indeed, Chess Story beautifully exhibits the private strategy that lies at the heart of Zweig’s literary labors, especially in his novellas and his biographical sketches. He might oversimplify his tale to accommodate a sweeping aphorism or a dramatic conclusion, but he always saw himself as a detective whose principal task it was, whether he was writing fiction or nonfiction, to unriddle the mystery that shaped the life of a Dostoyevsky or a Hölderlin, a Czentovic or a Dr. B. And to clothe his discoveries in eminently readable prose.

  It should surprise nobody that Zweig was an occasional correspondent of Freud’s, dedicated a collection of biographical essays to him, and thought of himself as Freud’s all
y in the great venture of understanding human nature. In 1929, Zweig a little effusively told Freud how highly he thought of psychoanalysis:

  I believe that the revolution you have called forth in the psychological and philosophical and the whole moral structure of our world greatly outweighs the merely therapeutic part of your discoveries. For today all the people who know nothing about you, every human being of 1930, even the one who had never heard the name of psychoanalyst, is already indirectly dyed through and through by your transformation of souls

  The very extravagance of Zweig’s admiration for Freud eloquently attests to his own aspiration to be the psychologist to his culture. In return, Freud’s enthusiasm for Stefan Zweig’s work may have been a little excessive. He declared Zweig a “personal friend” and his novella, Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau (Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, 1927), which closely resembles Chess Story, a “little masterpiece.” Zweig’s analyses were not quite psychoanalyses, but the characters he so freely invented in his fictions often seem like the subjects of gracefully presented case histories.

  Without literally repeating himself, Zweig frequently turned in his novellas to a narrative device— a form of presentation he might have patented, he employed it so frequently—that I might call a secondary narrator. He tends to enforce the intimacy of his “case histories” by resorting to a first-person narrator and at the same time keep this intimacy under control by having the events of his tale largely presented by a third person, who exploits the narrator as the recipient of a fascinating tale.

  In Chess Story, Zweig uses this distancing technique twice. In relating the background and the education of Mirko Czentovic who, as a kind of idiot savant, is ignorant of everything except chess, he employs a friend of the main narrator to fill in the indispensable details. And then, later in the novella, he has Dr. B. tell the narrator the story of his terrible schooling in chess by the Nazi conquerors of Austria. This crucial story oddly parallels the information the narrator had received about Czentovic’s apprenticeship: there is more than one way of growing into a master chess player. And this echo underscores Zweig’s indirect manner of getting the story underway and keeping it alive through the denouement. It permits him to be at once revelatory and discreet. He can be as liberal as he wishes to be, and no more.

  A look at Zweig’s Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, the one that Freud called a “little masterpiece,” should clarify his use of this technique of the secondary narrator. A distinguished widow in her early forties who has remained faithful to the memory of her late husband, on holiday in Monte Carlo, visits the casino and is fascinated by the sight of a young gambler’s hands. He is handsome, the age of the lady’s elder son. As he leaves the casino in despair, having lost a great deal of money, and possibly intending to kill himself, she follows him and tries to save him. She talks to him, gives him money, goes to his room, eventually spending the night with him, having exacted his guarantee not to gamble anymore. She promises to say goodbye to him at the railway station but misses his train. She then make a final visit to the casino, where once again she catches sight of the gambler’s hands. She reproaches him angrily and he throws at her the money she had given him for the trip home. The novella does not end until Zweig lets the reader know that her mission had failed: the young man committed suicide.

  The narrator does not expound the story directly; rather, he visits the lady at her invitation and she volunteers the story of her fateful twenty-four hours. In a paper of 1927, “Dostoyevsky and Parricide,” Freud praised the story for being “brilliantly told, faultlessly motivated,” but he also acknowledged that it was not a psychoanalytic story—Zweig had, to Freud’s mind, laid out the motives of all the actors “faultlessly,” but had concealed these motives from himself as well as his readers. Freud also recognized that the “façade given to the story by its author”—the secondary narrator—“seeks to disguise its analytic meaning.” By having the reputable middle-aged woman pour out her tale, which the narrator then retells as he was told it, the author and his narrator both stand protected. The lady, who has been excessively frank about all sorts of intimate physical and psychological details, refuses to tell him whether she and the stranger whose life she had wished to save made love. Freud, in summarizing Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, obviously thinks that they have. But the text is equivocal, and Zweig avoids fully disclosing an oedipal entanglement of mother and son that Freud sees as his true subject. Thus Zweig draws a last veil of reserve over his story, which is anything but a case history.

  This reserve haunts Chess Story as well. The author tells his readers through his primary narrator that Dr. B., who has become the principal figure in the novella, “would never again touch a chessboard.” Is that all? Will he eventually deal with his trauma and live, or, like Stefan Zweig, defeated by exile and depression, let his past conquer him and die? We know that Zweig’s world, the liberal culture of Central Europe, was no more; for a writer who could always count on a sizable and admiring audience, this was an ordeal hard to acknowledge and hard to survive. Before the all-too-final act of suicide, Zweig, writing Chess Story, might have included his readers more frankly, more openly, about the desperate struggles within him. But his discretion, so typical for him, kept him from such confessional candor. It is as though Chess Story is a message from an earlier age, from the World of Yesterday.

  — PETER GAY

  CHESS STORY

  ON THE great passenger steamer, due to depart New York for Buenos Aires at midnight, there was the usual last-minute bustle and commotion. Visitors from shore shoved confusedly to see their friends off, telegraph boys in cocked caps dashed through the lounges shouting names, trunks and flowers were carried past, and inquisitive children ran up and down the companionways, the orchestra playing imperturbably on deck all the while. As I was standing a bit apart from this hubbub, talking on the promenade deck with an acquaintance of mine, two or three flashbulbs flared near us—apparently the press had been quickly interviewing and photographing some celebrity just before we sailed. My friend glanced over and smiled. “That’s a rare bird you’ve got on board—that’s Czentovic.” I must have received this news with a rather blank look, for he went on to explain, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”

  In fact I now recalled this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more assiduous reader of newspapers than I, was able to add a number of anecdotes. About a year previously Czentovic had overnight entered the ranks of the greatest masters of the art of chess, such as Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, and Bogoljubov. Not since the appearance of the seven-year-old prodigy Reshevsky at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the penetration of a complete unknown into that circle of luminaries caused such a wide sensation. For Czentovic’s intellectual traits certainly did not seem to promise a dazzling career. It soon emerged that, chess champion or not, in private Czentovic was unable to write a correctly spelled sentence in any language, and, as one of his irritated peers gibed, “his ignorance was just as absolute in every other area.”

  Czentovic’s father, a penniless Yugoslavian Danube bargeman, had been killed in his tiny boat when it was crushed one night by a grain steamer in a remote area; the twelve-year-old boy had then been taken in by the local parson out of pity. The good reverend coached him at home, doing his level best to make up for what the lumpish, taciturn, broad-browed boy was unable to learn at the village school.

  But the parson’s efforts were in vain. The letters of the alphabet had been explained to the boy a hundred times, yet still he stared at them as though he had never seen them before; no matter how simple the subject, his brain labored heavily but retained nothing. At the age of fourteen he still counted on his fingers, and, though he was now an adolescent, he could read books and newspapers only with great difficulty. Yet
Mirko could not be called reluctant or willful. He obediently did what was asked, carried water, split wood, helped in the fields, cleaned the kitchen, and reliably (though with annoying slowness) finished any task he was given. But what irritated the good parson most about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless specifically told to, never asked a question, did not play with other boys, and undertook no activity that had not been explicitly assigned to him; once Mirko had finished his chores, he sat around listlessly indoors with the vacant look of sheep at pasture, taking not the slightest interest in what went on around him. While the parson, puffing on his long peasant pipe, played his usual three evening games of chess with the local constable, the lank-haired blond boy squatted silently beside them and gazed at the checkered board from beneath his heavy eyelids, seemingly somnolent and indifferent.

  One winter evening while the two players were engrossed in their daily game, the jingle of sleigh bells came from the village street, approaching with greater and greater speed. A peasant, his cap dusted with snow, stumped in hurriedly—his old mother was dying, and he wanted the parson to hurry so that he would be in time to administer the last rites. The parson followed without hesitation. As he was leaving, the constable, who was still drinking his beer, lit a fresh pipe and was preparing to pull on his heavy top boots when he noticed that Mirko’s gaze was riveted on the chessboard with the unfinished game.

  “So, you want to play it out, do you?” he said jokingly, completely convinced that the sleepy boy did not know how to move a single piece on the board correctly. The boy looked up shyly, then nodded and took the parson’s chair. After fourteen moves the constable had been beaten, and, he had to admit, through no careless error of his own. The second game ended no differently.