Such dual thinking really presupposes a complete split of consciousness, an arbitrary ability to switch the function of the brain on and off again as if it were a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow. Well, to be brief, in my desperation I spent months trying to achieve this absurd impossibility. However, I had no option but to pursue it, if I were not to fall victim to pure madness or see my mind waste away entirely. My dreadful situation forced me at least to try splitting myself into a Black self and a White self, to keep from being crushed by the terrible void around me.’

Dr B. leaned back in his deckchair and closed his eyes for a minute. It was as if he were trying to suppress a disturbing memory by force. Once again the strange little tic that he couldn’t control appeared, this time at the left-hand corner of his mouth. Then he sat up a little straighter in his deckchair.

‘Well – up to this point I hope I’ve explained it all reasonably intelligibly to you. But I’m afraid I’m not at all sure that I can give you as clear an idea of what happened next. For this new occupation put such extraordinary pressure on the brain that it made any kind of self-control at the same time impossible. I’ve already told you that in my opinion playing chess against yourself is essentially absurd, but even that absurdity might stand a minimal chance with a real chessboard in front of you, since the reality of the board does allow you to distance yourself to some extent, occupy a different material territory. In front of a real chessboard with real chessmen, you can insert pauses for thought, change from one side of the table to the other in purely physical terms, seeing the situation now through Black’s eyes and now through the eyes of White. But forced as I was to project these battles against myself – or with myself, if you like – into imaginary space, I had to keep the situation on all sixty-four squares clearly in my mind, and in addition calculate not just the present state of the game but the possible subsequent moves of both partners, while also – and I know how ludicrous all this sounds – imagining four or five moves in advance for each of my selves, working them out twice or three times, no, six, eight, twelve times. In this game in the abstract space of the mind I was obliged – forgive me for my presumption in asking you to think along these deranged lines – to work out four or five moves ahead as player White, and the same as player Black, combining in advance all the situations that might arise as the game developed, and I had to do it, so to speak, with two brains, White’s brain and Black’s brain. But even this splitting of myself wasn’t the most dangerous part of my abstruse experiment; that was the fact that in devising the games independently I suddenly lost the ground under my feet and fell into an abyss. Just playing through the tournament matches as I had in the earlier weeks, after all, was nothing but reproduction, purely the re-enactment of material provided to me, and as such it was no more of a strain than learning poems by heart or memorizing legal paragraphs. It was a limited, disciplined activity, and excellent mental exercise. My two games played in the morning and two games in the afternoon were a quota that I could achieve without becoming excited; they acted as a substitute for a normal occupation, and anyway, if I went wrong in the course of a game or wasn’t sure what to do next, I could always resort to the book. That was the only reason why this activity had been such a healthy, rather soothing one for my shattered nerves, because playing out games between other people didn’t involve me personally; it made no difference to me whether Black or White won, since it was really Alekhine or Bogolyubov trying to win the championship, and I myself, my mind and soul enjoyed the games only as a spectator, appreciating their changes of fortune and felicitous aspects. But as soon as I tried playing against myself I began unconsciously issuing myself with a challenge. Each of my two selves, my Black self and my White self, had to compete with the other, and each separ-ately felt an impatient ambition to triumph, to win; as my Black self I felt feverish anxiety after every move to see what my White self would do next. Each of my two selves felt triumphant when the other made a mistake, and at the same time was angry with itself for its own carelessness.

‘All this seems pointless, and in fact such an artificial schizophrenia, such a split of the consciousness, with its admixture of dangerous excitement, would be unthinkable in a normal human being in normal circumstances. But don’t forget that I had been forcibly torn from all normality, I was a captive, innocent but imprisoned, I had been subtly tormented with solitary confinement for months, I was a man who had long wished to vent his pent-up fury on something. And as I had nothing but this pointless game against myself, my fury and desire for revenge were injected, with fanatical enthusiasm, into the game itself. Something in me wanted to be proved right, and I had only that other self within me to oppose, so during the game I worked myself up into almost manic agitation. At first I had thought calmly, soberly, I had paused between one game and the next so that I could recover from the strain, but gradually my inflamed nerves wouldn’t let me wait. As soon as my White self had made a move, my Black self was feverishly advancing; as soon as a game was over I was challenging myself to the next, because each time one of my chess selves was defeated by the other it wanted its revenge. I shall never be able to say even approximately how many games I played against myself during those last months in my cell, as a result of this insatiable derangement – perhaps a thousand, perhaps more. It was an obsession against which I had no defence; from morning to night I thought of nothing but bishops and pawns, rooks and kings, a and b and c, checkmate and castling.