A large steamship is on its way from New York to Buenos Aires. Unbeknownst to most onboard, two chess aficionados are travelling with them. One is a young man, “an odd fish”, Mirko Czentovic who’s the world chess champion and another is a closet expert who’ll reveal himself in time.

Thus begins Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s 1942 novella, A Chess Story. The Pushkin Press edition has been translated from the German by Alexander Starritt. Legendary translator Andrea Bell’s translation of the book was published by Penguin Random House as a clothbound classic. In addition to these two, various editions and translations exist of the story that has charmed and fascinated readers in its short 80 years of existence.

The first match

The nameless narrator, a passenger on the ship, is a friendly man who is desperate for some entertainment. Czentovic’s fame has already stoked his interest, even more so because outside of chess he’s something of a dimwit. The assessment of his intelligence is devastating – “his education in every field was uniformly nil.” A poor orphan who took up chess for the lack of anything better to do, he has emerged as a world champion at the age of 20. No education and an absence of street smart have not affected him in the least, for chess matches pay him handsomely. He has accumulated considerable wealth and an unchallenged reign in the chess world have made him extremely self-important.

Zweig constructs his back story in one swift stroke and we can imagine exactly what kind of a man Czentovic might be. A nouveau riche and a child prodigy, Czentovic has become a mercenary too – a game, even as inconsequential as one on a steamship, is not worth his while unless he stands to gain monetarily from it.

McConnor, a competitive man on the ship who plays chess with as much passion as one would spin the roulette, teams up with the narrator to collect enough funds to pay for a match with Czentovic. At this point, the reader is convinced that this will be the unusual little moment when powered by passion alone, the amateur will trump the grandmaster. After all, cockiness, however well-earned, is intolerable to everyone else. The underdog beating the top dog would have been a good story too. I know I would have been happy with it.

But Zweig has something else up his sleeve. In the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. It is Dr B. “For God’s sake, don’t!”, he blurts out while stopping McConnor from playing a move. Who could this man be? He is ungenerously described as someone with “almost chalk-like pallor”. However, his brilliance is revealed soon enough as he recalls from memory the moves grandmasters played and rolls off technical instructions to help McConnor put up a fight.

The match ends in a draw. This is a shock to Czentovic and as good as a victory for McConnor – and everyone else.

With passion and energy running high, a third match is proposed between Czentovic and McConnor. McConnor agrees to it readily but deputies Mr B to play against the world champion. Mr B is taken aback, a look of confusion spreads across his face – he’d rather not.

A match for a match

Here begins the second part of the novella which swiftly hurtles into the history of Nazi occupation and the tyranny of the Gestapo who were indiscriminate and ruthless in incarcerating anyone they deemed suspicious. This strand of the story is extra audacious for Zweig was writing the book when Austrians were being heavily persecuted for opposing Nazi rule.

Hereon, Zweig creates an astonishingly vivid dual world between the present and the (figurative) past where Mr B recounts being driven to madness in solitary confinement in a Nazi prison. He is almost about to confess to his crimes when he manages to get hold of a book. In fact, he snags it from the Gestapo. He is “no longer alone”, however, much to his annoyance, it turns out to be a chess almanac. There is no story to be read here! The almanac is a dreadfully boring piece of literature – 150 matches explained in clean technical terms. Or, “an algebra” to which Mr B had no “key.”

As boredom and madness set into his bones, and with endless unused time on his hands, Mr B begins to imagine these games. He faithfully recreates the moves in his mind and within six days becomes something of an expert. A “bold theft” that has finally given him something to look forward to, he proceeds to divide his days into chess matches – two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a quick run-through in the evening.

He is exactly the opposite of Czentovic. There is no board and there are no medals to be earned – the only reward is training himself against “false threats and concealed manoeuvre”. The lack of an opponent compels him to split himself into “Black Me” and “White Me”, each game leading to “manic over-animation”. A “chess poisoning” that has permeated his waking hours and sleep.

The liberation that he hoped his prized, stolen book would bring enervates him of life force. The madness reaches him one way or another.

Zweig does not employ any visual tactics to heighten the drama. The reader feels an itch creeping up their skin – the doomed end is visible to the players before they have even made their move. A devastating loss or an intoxicating win is entirely dependent on tiny wooden pieces that are as helpless as the player orchestrating their moves. The board seems to have a mind of its own, its secrets tucked away in an incomprehensible, mercurial grammar. When Czentovic takes his allotted time of ten minutes to make a move, Dr B gets irritated by how slow his opponent is. To dissipate the discomfort of the moment, he starts to unconsciously pace the exact dimension of the cell in which he had been imprisoned by the Nazis.

There could have been a 300-page story in there somewhere. Conversely, it could have been a thrilling long story of a single match between Czentovic and McConnor. Instead, by changing course midway, Zweig rewards the reader with a tale of power and brevity about the ultimate damage caused by forced solitude and seeking freedom in absolute dichotomy.

I cannot claim to understand sports very well but A Chess Story has the most thrilling, nail-biting endings that could give a live telecast of a more physical sport a run for its money.

A Chess Story, Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Alexander Starritt, Pushkin Press.