When the game ends, life does not end for these characters, but it does for their author. The parts of Chess Story are all aspects of Zweig’s life. The game between the two is climatic, one calculating on the board, one in his mind, but the dualities don’t end there. One wonders at first if it was just a dream that he played chess in his mind in prison and he wonders too, having played only in his mind, will he be able to sit at a board faced with a real player and be able to play. Then playing against himself, considering even the guard bringing his food an interruption, he becomes fuzzy during the interrogations because he only wants to return to the isolation of his games and the anticipation of black’s moves when he is white and white’s moves when he is black. He learns to play the games in his head until they are all memorized. Hoping to find a book of poetry, it is 150 master chess games. He pilfers a book from one of his interrogators after a few months of existing in a state of nothingness. B had been imprisoned and held in isolation for a year prior to this where he had been playing chess in his mind as a means to keep from breaking.

The world champion Czentovic, orphaned young, took to chess and absolutely nothing else, calculates magnificently, yet requires a board and chessmen in front of him. B., the game arranged on a steamer to Buenos Aires. The game is played between the world champion Czentovic and a Dr. The narrator of the book is a character in the story but not one of the two chess players and, like the author, he is in exile. In 1942, during the months of his exile in Brazil with his second wife, and during the time that he and she played out master chess games in their isolation, Stefan Zweig wrote his last book, completing it just days before he and his wife’s double suicide. Chess Story is the story of a chess game.

Chess player stefan zweig