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 ally 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.