All my being and feeling drove me to the chequered square. My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves and chess problems; sometimes I woke with my forehead perspiring and realized that I must still have been unconsciously playing even as I slept, and when I dreamed of people I did so exclusively in terms of the movements of the bishop, the rook, the knight’s leaps forward and back. Even when I was summoned for interrogation I couldn’t think concisely about my responsibility any more; I have an idea that during the last interrogations I must have expressed myself with some confusion, because now and then my inquisitors looked at me strangely. But all the time they asked questions and consulted each other, I was just waiting, in my disastrous passion, to be taken back to my cell to go on with my playing, my mad playing of another game and then another and another. Every interruption disturbed me; even the quarter of an hour when the jailer was cleaning my prison cell, even the two minutes when he brought me food tormented my feverish impatience. Sometimes the bowl containing my meal still stood there untouched in the evening; I had forgotten to eat as I played chess. My only physical feeling was a terrible thirst; it must have been the fever of my constant thinking and playing. I emptied my bottle of water in two draughts, and plagued the jailer for more, yet next moment my tongue felt dry in my mouth again. At last my excitement as I played – and I did nothing else from morning to night – rose to such a degree that I couldn’t sit still for a moment; I kept pacing up and down as I thought about the games, faster and faster and faster I paced, becoming more and more heated the closer the end of the game came; my desire to win, to triumph, to defeat myself gradually became a kind of rage, and I was trembling with impatience, for one of my chess selves was always too slow for the other. One urged the other on; ridiculous as it may seem to you, when one of my selves didn’t counter the other self’s move quickly enough I began telling myself angrily, “Faster, faster!” or “Go on, go on!” Of course I now realize that this condition of mine was a pathological form of intellectual over-stimulation, for which I can find no name but one hitherto unknown to medicine: chess poisoning. Finally this monomaniac obsession began to attack not just my brain but my body too. I lost weight, my sleep was restless and broken, when I woke up it always cost me a great effort to force my leaden eyelids open; sometimes I felt so weak that when I picked up a glass to drink I had difficulty lifting it to my lips because my hands shook so much. But as soon as the game began a wild strength came over me; I walked up and down with my fists clenched, and sometimes, as if through a red mist, I heard my own voice crying hoarsely and venomously, “Check!” or “Mate!” to itself.

‘I myself can’t tell you how this terrible, unspeakable condition came to a crisis. All I know is that I woke up one morning, and it was a different waking from usual. My body felt as if it were separate from me; I was resting softly and comfortably. A heavy, beneficial weariness such as I hadn’t known for months weighed on my lids, so warm and kindly that at first I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. I lay awake for a few minutes enjoying this heavy apathy, lying there lethargically with my senses pleasantly dulled. Suddenly I thought I heard voices behind me, live human voices speaking words, and you can’t imagine my delight, because for months, for almost a year, I had heard no words but the harsh, sharp, malicious remarks made by my bench of interrogators. You’re dreaming, I told myself, you’re dreaming. Don’t open your eyes whatever you do! Let the dream go on, or you’ll see your accursed cell around you again, the chair and the washstand and the table and the wallpaper with its pattern forever the same. You’re dreaming – go on with the dream!

‘But curiosity got the upper hand. Slowly and cautiously, I opened my eyelids. And wonder of wonders: I was in another room, a larger, more spacious room than my hotel cell. An unbarred window let daylight in, and there was a view of trees, green trees swaying in the wind instead of my rigid firewall, the walls here gleamed smooth and white, the ceiling was white and rose high above me – it was true, I was lying in another bed, one I didn’t know, and human voices were whispering quietly behind me, it really wasn’t a dream. I must instinctively have given a violent start of surprise, because I heard steps approaching. A woman came up to me, moving gracefully, a woman with a white cap on her hair: a nurse. A shiver of delight ran through me; it was a year since I had set eyes on a woman. I stared at this lovely apparition, and there must have been a wild, ecstatic expression in my eyes, for as she came closer the woman said soothingly but firmly, “Calm! Keep calm!” But I merely listened to her voice – wasn’t that a human being speaking? And in addition – an unimaginable miracle – speaking in a soft, warm, almost tender woman’s voice. I stared avidly at her mouth, for in that year of hell I had come to think it improbable that one human being could speak kindly to another.