PENGUIN BOOKS
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
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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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. The policeman, who hadn’t yet finished his glass of beer, lit another pipe to round off the evening, and was just about to pull his heavy boots on when he noticed Mirko’s eyes fixed unwaveringly on the chessboard and the game they had begun.
‘Well, would you like to finish it?’ he joked, sure that the sleepy boy had no idea how to move a single chessman on the board correctly. The lad looked up timidly, then nodded and sat down in the priest’s chair. After fourteen moves the policeman was beaten, and what was more, he had to admit that his defeat couldn’t be blamed on any inadvertently careless move of his own. The second game produced the same result.
‘Balaam’s ass!’ cried the priest in astonishment on his return, and explained to the policeman, whose knowledge of the Bible was less extensive than his own, that a similar miracle had occurred two thousand years ago, when a dumb creature suddenly spoke with the voice of wisdom. Despite the late hour, the priest could not refrain from challenging his semi-illiterate pupil to a duel. Mirko eas
ily defeated him too. He played slowly, imperturbably, doggedly, never once raising his lowered head with its broad brow to look up from the board. But he played with undeniable confidence; over the next few days neither the policeman nor the priest managed to win a game against him. The priest, who was in a better position than anyone else to assess his pupil’s backwardness in other respects, was genuinely curious to see how far this strange, one-sided talent would stand up to a harder test. Having taken Mirko to the village barber to get his shaggy, straw-blond hair cut and make him reasonably presentable, he drove him in his sleigh to the small town nearby, where he knew that the café in the main square was frequented by a club of chess enthusiasts with whom, experience told him, he couldn’t compete. These regulars were not a little surprised when the priest propelled the red-cheeked, fair-haired fifteen-year-old, in his sheepskin coat turned inside out and his high, heavy boots, into the coffee-house, where the boy stood awkwardly in a corner, eyes timidly downcast, until he was called over to one of the chess tables. Mirko lost the first game because he had never seen the good priest play the Sicilian Opening. The second game, against the best player in the club, was a draw. From the third and fourth games on, he defeated them all one by one.
As exciting events very seldom happen in a small South Slavonian provincial town, the first appearance of this rustic champion was an instant sensation among the assembled notables. They unanimously agreed that the prodigy absolutely must stay in town until the next day, so that they could summon the other members of the chess club, and more particularly get in touch with that fanatical chess enthusiast, old Count Simczic, at his castle. The priest, who now regarded his pupil with an entirely new pride, but although delighted by his discovery didn’t want to miss the Sunday service which it was his duty to conduct, declared himself ready to leave Mirko there to be tested further. Young Czentovic was put up in the hotel at the chess club’s expense, and that evening set eyes on a water closet for the first time in his life. On Sunday afternoon the chess room was full to overflowing. Mirko, sitting perfectly still at the board for four hours on end, defeated opponent after opponent without uttering a word or even looking up. Finally a simultaneous match was suggested. It took them some time to get the untaught boy to understand that a simultaneous match meant he would be playing on his own against all comers, but as soon as Mirko grasped the idea he quickly settled to the task, went slowly from table to table in his heavy, creaking boots, and in the end won seven out of the eight games.
Now earnest consultations were held. Although this new champion did not, strictly speaking, belong to the town, local pride was all afire. Perhaps the little place, its presence on the map hardly even noticed by anyone before, could have the honour of launching a famous man into the world for the first time ever. An agent called Koller, whose usual job was simply to lay on chanteuses and female singers for the garrison’s cabaret, said that if there were funds available to cover a year he was ready and willing to have the young man expertly trained in the art of chess by an excellent minor master whom he knew in Vienna. Count Simczic, who in sixty years of playing chess daily had never encountered such a remarkable opponent, immediately signed an agreement. That was the day when the astonishing career of the boatman’s son took off.
Within six months Mirko had mastered all the technical mysteries of chess, although with one curious reservation, which was frequently observed and mocked in chess-playing circles later. For Czentovic never managed to play a single game of chess from memory – or blindfold, as they say in the profession. He entirely lacked the ability to draw up his battlefield in the boundless space of the imagination, and always needed to have the black and white board with its sixty-four squares and thirty-two chessmen tangibly present. Even at the height of his international fame he always travelled with a folding pocket chess set, so that if he wanted to reconstruct a championship game or solve some problem, he had the position visible before him. This defect, trifling in itself, showed a lack of imaginative power, and was discussed in the inner circles of chess as heatedly as if, in a musical context, an outstanding virtuoso or conductor had proved unable to play or conduct without a score open in front of him. However, this curious quality did not delay Mirko’s stupendous rise in the least. At seventeen, he had already won a dozen chess prizes; at eighteen he was champion of Hungary, and at the age of twenty he finally captured the world championship. The most audacious of champions, every one of them immeasurably superior to him in intellectual talents, imagination and daring, fell victim to his cold, tenacious logic, just as Napoleon was defeated by the ponderous Kutuzov, or Hannibal by Fabius Cunctator, of whom Livy says that he too showed striking signs of apathy and imbecility in his childhood. So it was that the illustrious gallery of chess grandmasters, who unite in their ranks all kinds of intellectual superiority, who are philosophers, mathematicians, whose natures are calculating, imaginative and often creative, found their company invaded for the first time by a complete stranger to the world of the mind, a stolid, taciturn, rustic youth from whom even the wiliest of journalists never succeeded in coaxing a single word that was the least use for publicity purposes. It was true that what Czentovic withheld from the press in the way of polished remarks was soon amply compensated for by anecdotes about his person. For the moment he rose from the chessboard, where he was an incomparable master, Czentovic became a hopelessly grotesque and almost comic figure; despite his formal black suit, his ostentatious tie with its rather flashy pearl tiepin, and his carefully manicured fingers, in conduct and manners he was still the dull-witted country boy who used to sweep the priest’s living-room in the village. To the amusement and annoyance of his chess-playing colleagues, he clumsily and with positively shameless impudence sought to make as much money as he could from his gift and his fame, displaying a petty and often even vulgar greed. He travelled from town to town, always staying in the cheapest hotels, he would play in the most pitiful of clubs if he was paid his fee, he let himself be depicted in soap advertisements, and ignoring the mockery of his rivals, who knew perfectly well that he was unable to write three sentences properly, he even gave his name to a ‘philosophy of chess’ that was really written for its publisher, a canny businessman, by an obscure student from Galicia. Like all such dogged characters, he had no sense of the ridiculous; since winning the world tournament he regarded himself as the most important man in the world, while the knowledge that he had defeated all these clever, intellectual men, dazzling speakers and writers in their own field, and above all the tangible fact that he earned more than they did, turned his original insecurity into a cold and usually ostentatious pride.
‘But how could so rapid a rise to fame fail to turn such an empty head?’ concluded my friend, who had just been telling me some of the classic instances of Czentovic’s childish impudence. ‘How could a country boy of twenty-one from the Banat not be infected by vanity when all of a sudden, just for pushing chessmen about a wooden board for a little while, he earns more in a week than his entire village at home earns chopping wood and slaving away for a whole year? And isn’t it appallingly easy to think yourself a great man when you’re not burdened by the faintest notion that men like Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived? With his limited understanding, the fellow knows just one thing: he hasn’t lost a single game of chess for months. So, as he has no idea that there are values in this world other than chess and money, he has every reason to feel pleased with himself.’
These comments of my friend’s did not fail to arouse my lively curiosity. I have always been interested in any kind of monomaniac obsessed by a single idea, for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity; characters like this, apparently remote from reality, are like termites using their own material to build a remarkable and unique small-scale version of the world. So I did not conceal my intention of taking a closer look at this strange specimen of an intellectually one-track mind during the twelve-day voyage to Rio.
However
– ‘You won’t have much luck there,’ my friend warned me. ‘As far as I know, no one has ever yet managed to extract the faintest amount of psychological material from Czentovic. For all his severe limitations, he’s a wily peasant and shrewd enough not to present himself as a target, by the simple means of avoiding all conversation except with fellow countrymen of his own background, whom he seeks out in small inns. When he feels he’s in the presence of an educated person he goes into his shell, so no one can boast of ever hearing him say something stupid, or of having assessed the apparently unplumbed depths of his ignorance.’
In fact my friend turned out to be right. During the first few days of our voyage, it proved completely impossible to get close to Czentovic without being actually importunate, which is not my way. He did sometimes walk on the promenade deck, but always with his hands clasped behind his back in that attitude of proud self-absorption adopted by Napoleon in his famous portrait; in addition, he always made his peripatetic rounds of the deck so rapidly and jerkily that you would have had to pursue him at a trot if you were to speak to him. And he never showed his face in the saloons, the bar or the smoking-room. As the steward told me in confidence, he spent most of the day in his cabin, practising or going back over games of chess on a large board.
After three days I began to feel positively irked by the fact that his doggedly defensive technique was working better than my will to approach him. I had never before in my life had a chance to become personally acquainted with a chess grandmaster, and the more I tried to picture such a man’s nature, the less I could imagine a form of cerebral activity revolving exclusively, for a whole lifetime, around a space consisting of sixty-four black and white squares. From my own experience, I knew the mysterious attraction of the ‘royal game’, the only game ever devised by mankind that rises magnificently above the tyranny of chance, awarding the palm of victory solely to the mind, or rather to a certain kind of mental gift. And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion’s brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!