Chess Story

Original (German):

Schachnovelle

1942

Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

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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.

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.