B, a man who tells the tale of how he came to play chess whilst a prisoner of the Gestapo. Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story published by New York Review Books (NYRB) is 84 pages of literary counterpart to a master chess game of Capablanca or Kasparov, a novel where the first-person narrator, an Austrian, just so happens to be on board a passenger steamer with a world chess champion by the name of Czentovic and also, as it turns out, a fellow Austrian referred to as Dr. If both author and reader expand their literary horizons and deepen their appreciation of life’s mysteries, then both can declare ‘checkmate’. I detect strong parallels between reading a novel and the game of chess: there is the author sitting on one side, playing white, the reader on the other side, playing black instead of the chess board and chess pieces there is the novel the author’s opening chapter is the chess player’s opening, the middle of the novel is, of course, the middle game, and the closing chapter is the end game. Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938 Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925 Conflicts). He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928 The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature.
Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky ( Drei Meister, 1920 Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche ( Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925 Master Builders). Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913.
He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe.
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