Chess Story

'Chess Story', also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in his 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 its psychological damage. He dramatizes the internal destruction inflicted by tyranny. The work is also one of the rare pieces of literature to bring alive the complex and overpowering feelings associated with the great game of chess. Travelers sailing from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess. He is, as they soon discover, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They gather 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, which is also a meditation on the burden of memory and the ways in which resistance and vulnerability are entwined in the human spirit.