Chess

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Chess

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, and gained fame first as a poet and translator, and then as a biographer, short-story writer and novelist. Zweig’s first works were poetry and a poetic drama, Jeremia (1917), which expressed his passionate antiwar feelings. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London to research a book on Mary, Queen of Scots. He also visited Sigmund Freud, whom he had met already in the 1920s. In 1938 he became a British citizen, and in 1940, after a successful lecture tour in South America, he and his second wife Charlotte E. Altmann settled in Brazil. Disillusioned and isolated, Zweig committed suicide with his wife, in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro on 23 February 1942.

Zweig’s best-known works of fiction include Beware of Pity (1938) and Chess: A Novella (1944), as well as many historical biographies of subjects as diverse as Marie Antoinette, Erasmus, Mary Queen of Scots, Magellan and Balzac.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Chess

a novella

Translated by Anthea Bell

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Published by the Penguin Group

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First published as Schachnovelle in 1943

Published as a Penguin Red Classic 2006

Copyright © Stefan Zweig, 1943

Translation copyright © Anthea Bell, 2006

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196506-2

The usual last-minute bustle of activity reigned on board the large passenger steamer that was to leave New York for Buenos Aires at midnight. Visitors who had come up from the country to see their friends off were pushing and shoving, telegraph boys with caps tilted sideways on their heads ran through the saloons calling out names, luggage and flowers were being brought aboard, inquisitive children ran up and down the steps, while the band for the deck show played imperturbably on. I was standing on the promenade deck a little way from all this turmoil, talking to an acquaintance, when two or three bright flashlights went off close to us. It seemed that some prominent person was being quickly interviewed by reporters and photographed just before the ship left. My friend glanced that way and smiled. ‘Ah, you have a rare bird on board there. That’s Czentovic.’ And as this information obviously left me looking rather blank, he explained further. ‘Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s been doing the rounds of America from the east coast to the west, playing in tournaments, and now he’s off to fresh triumphs in Argentina.’

I did in fact remember the name of the young world champion, and even some of the details of his meteoric career. My friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to add a whole series of anecdotes. About a year ago, Czentovic had suddenly risen to be ranked with the most experienced masters of the art of chess, men like Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker and Bogolyubov. Not since the appearance of the seven-year-old infant prodigy Rzeschewski at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the incursion into that famous guild of a complete unknown aroused such general notice. For Czentovic’s intellectual qualities by no means seemed to have marked him out for such a dazzling career. Soon the secret was leaking out that, in private life, this grandmaster of chess couldn’t write a sentence in any language without making spelling mistakes, and as one of his piqued colleagues remarked with irate derision, ‘his ignorance was universal in all fields’. The son of a poor South Slavonian boatman, whose tiny craft had been run down one night by a freight steamer carrying grain, the boy, then twelve, had been taken in after his father’s death by the priest of his remote village out of charity, and by providing extra tuition at home the good Father did his very best to compensate for what the taciturn, stolid, broad-browed child had failed to learn at the village school.

But his efforts were in vain. Even after the written characters had been explained to him a hundred times, Mirko kept staring at them as if they were unfamiliar, and his ponderously operating brain could not grasp the simplest educational subjects. Even at the age of fourteen he still had to use his fingers to do sums, and it was an enormous effort for the adolescent boy to read a book or a newspaper. Yet Mirko could not be called reluctant or recalcitrant. He obediently did as he was told, fetched water, split firewood, worked in the fields, cleared out the kitchen, and dependably, if at an irritatingly slow pace, performed any service asked of him. But what particularly upset the good priest about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless he was especially requested to do it, he never asked a question, didn’t play with other lads, and didn’t seek occupation of his own accord without being expressly told to. As soon as Mirko had done his chores around the house, he sat stolidly in the living-room with that vacant gaze seen in sheep out at pasture, paying not the least attention to what was going on around him. While the priest, smoking his long country pipe, played his usual three games of chess in the evening with the local policeman, the fair-haired boy would sit beside them in silence, staring from under his heavy eyelids at the chequered board with apparently sleepy indifference.

One winter evening, while the two players were absorbed in their daily game, the sound of little sleigh bells approaching fast and then even faster was heard out in the village street. A farmer, his cap dusted with snow, tramped hastily in: his old mother was on her deathbed, could the priest come quickly to give her Extreme Unction before she died? Without a moment’s hesitation the priest followed him out.