Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

  “Balaam’s ass!” exclaimed the astounded parson upon his return, explaining to the constable, who was not so well versed in the Bible, that by a similar miracle two thousand years ago a dumb creature had suddenly found the power of intelligent speech. In spite of the late hour, the parson could not refrain from challenging his semiliterate famulus. Mirko beat him too with ease. He played doggedly, slowly, stolidly, without once lifting his bowed broad forehead from the board. But he played with unassailable certainty; during the days to come neither the constable nor the parson was able to win a game against him. The parson, who knew better than anyone how backward his pupil was in other respects, now became curious in earnest as to how far this one strange talent might withstand a more rigorous test. After having Mirko’s unkempt blond hair cut at the village barber’s, to make him somewhat presentable, he took him in his sleigh to the small neighboring city where, in a corner of the café in the main square, there were chess enthusiasts for whom (as he had found) he himself was no match. There was no small stir among them when the parson pushed the tow-headed, rosy-cheeked fifteen-year-old in his fur-lined sheepskin jacket and heavy, high-top boots into the coffeehouse, where, ill at ease, the boy stood in a corner with shyly downcast eyes until someone called him over to one of the chess tables. Mirko lost against his first opponent, because he had never seen the “Sicilian opening” in the good parson’s game. He drew the second game, against the best player. From the third and fourth games on, he beat all his opponents, one after another.

  Now it is rare indeed that anything exciting happens in a small provincial city in Yugoslavia, and the first appearance of this rustic champion caused an instant sensation among those in attendance. There was unanimous agreement that the boy wonder must definitely remain in the city until the next day, so that the other members of the chess club could be assembled and especially so that old Count Simczic, a chess fanatic, could be reached at his castle. The parson looked at his ward with a pride that was quite new, but, for all his joy of discovery, he still did not wish to neglect his duty to perform the Sunday services; he declared himself willing to leave Mirko behind for a further test. The young Czentovic was put up in the hotel at the chess club’s expense and saw a water closet that evening for the first time. The next afternoon, the chess room in the café was jammed. Mirko, sitting motionless in front of the board for four hours, defeated one player after another without uttering a word or even looking up; finally a simultaneous game was proposed. It took some time to make the ignorant boy understand that in a simultaneous game he would be the only opponent of a range of players. But once Mirko had grasped this, he quickly warmed to the task. He moved slowly from table to table, his heavy shoes squeaking, and in the end won seven of the eight games.

  At this point great deliberations began. Although this new champion was not strictly speaking a resident, regional pride was keenly aroused just the same. Perhaps the small city, whose presence on the map had hardly ever been noticed, could finally boast of an international celebrity. An agent by the name of Koller, who otherwise represented nobody but chanteuses and cabaret singers employed at the garrison, announced that, in return for a year’s subsidy, he would arrange to have the young man given professional training in the art of chess by an excellent minor master of his acquaintance in Vienna. Count Simczic, who in sixty years of daily play had never encountered such a remarkable opponent, immediately underwrote the amount. That day marked the beginning of the astonishing career of the boatman’s son.

  After half a year Mirko had mastered all the secrets of chess technique, though with a peculiar limitation that was later to be much noted and ridiculed in professional circles. For Czentovic never managed to play a single game by memory alone—“blind,” as the professionals say. He completely lacked the ability to situate the field of battle in the unlimited realm of the imagination. He always needed to have the board with its sixty-four black and white squares and thirty-two pieces physically in front of him; even when he was world-famous, he carried a folding pocket chess set with him at all times so that, if he wanted to reconstruct a game or solve a problem, he would be able to examine the positions of the pieces by eye. This failing, in itself minor, betrayed a lack of imaginative power and was the subject of lively discussion in elite circles, of the sort that might be heard among musicians if a prominent virtuoso or conductor had proven himself unable to play or conduct without an open score. But this strange idiosyncrasy did nothing whatever to slow Mirko’s stupendous climb. At seventeen he had already won a dozen prizes, at eighteen the Hungarian Championship, and at twenty he was champion of the world. The most audacious grandmasters, every one of them infinitely superior to him in intellectual gifts, imagination, and daring, fell to his cold and inexorable logic as Napoleon to the ponderous Kutuzov or Hannibal to Fabius Cunctator (who, according to Livy’s report, displayed similar conspicuous traits of phlegm and imbecility in childhood). Thus it happened that the illustrious gallery of chess champions, including among their number the most varied types of superior intellect—philosophers, mathematicians, people whose natural talents were computational, imaginative, often creative—was for the first time invaded by a total outsider to the intellectual world, a dull, taciturn peasant lad, from whom even the craftiest newspapermen were never able to coax a single word of any journalistic value. Of course, what Czentovic denied the newspapers in the way of polished sentences was soon amply compensated for in anecdotes about his person. For the instant he stood up from the chessboard, where he was without peer, Czentovic became an irredeemably grotesque, almost comic figure; despite his solemn black suit, his splendid cravat with its somewhat showy pearl stickpin, and his painstakingly manicured fingernails, his behavior and manners remained those of the simple country boy who had once swept out the parson’s room in the village. To the amusement and annoyance of his professional peers, he was artless and almost brazen in extracting, with a miserly, even vulgar greed, what money he could from his talent and fame. He traveled from city to city, always staying in the cheapest hotels, he played in the most pathetic clubs as long as they paid his fee, he permitted himself to appear in soap advertisements, and even—ignoring the mockery of his competitors, who knew quite well that he couldn’t put three sentences together—sold his name for use on the cover of a Philosophy of Chess which had actually been written for the enterprising publisher by an insignificant Galician student. Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had no sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

  “But why wouldn’t such a rapid rise to fame send an empty head like that into a spin?” concluded my friend, who had just related some classic examples of Czentovic’s childishly authoritative manner. “Why wouldn’t a twenty-one-year-old country boy from the Banat start putting on airs when pushing some pieces around on a wooden board is suddenly earning him more in a week than his whole village back home makes in an entire year of woodcutting and the most backbreaking drudgery? And, actually, isn’t it damn easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t troubled by the slightest notion that a Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, or Napoleon ever existed? This lad has just one piece of knowledge in his blinkered brain—that he hasn’t lost a single chess game in months—and since he has no idea that there’s anything of value in the world other than chess and money, he has every reason to be pleased with himself.”

  My friend’s observations did not fail to arouse a special curiosity in me. All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites
into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. Thus I made no secret of my intention to subject this odd specimen of a one-track mind to a closer examination during the twelve-day voyage to Rio.

  But my friend warned: “You won’t have much luck. As far as I know, no one has yet succeeded in getting anything of the slightest psychological interest out of Czentovic. That wily peasant is tremendously shrewd behind all his abysmal limitations. He never lets anything slip—thanks to the simple technique of avoiding all conversation except with com-patriots of his from the same walk of life, people he finds in small hotels. When he senses an educated person he crawls into his shell. That way no one will ever be able to boast of having heard him say something stupid or of having plumbed the depths of his seemingly boundless ignorance.”

  And in fact my friend would turn out to be right. During the first few days of the voyage it proved to be entirely impossible to approach Czentovic short of roughly thrusting myself upon him, which all things considered is not in my line. He did sometimes stride across the promenade deck, but always with a bearing of proud self-absorption, hands clasped behind him, like Napoleon in the famous pose; then too he always made his tour of the deck so hurriedly and propulsively that it would have been necessary to pursue him at a trot in order to accost him. Nor did he ever show himself in the lounges, the bar, or the smoking room; as the steward informed me in response to a discreet inquiry, he spent the greater part of the day in his cabin, practicing or reviewing chess games on a bulky board.

  After three days I was beginning to be truly annoyed that his dogged defenses were outmaneuvering my determination to get near him. I had never in my life had an opportunity to make the personal acquaintance of a chess champion, and the more I now sought to form an impression of such a temperament, the more unimaginable appeared to me a mind absorbed for a lifetime in a domain of sixty-four black and white squares. From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the “royal game,” which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end? Any child can learn its basic rules, any amateur can try his hand at it; and yet, within the inalterable confines of a chessboard, masters unlike any others evolve, people with a talent for chess and chess alone, special geniuses whose gifts of imagination, patience and skill are just as precisely apportioned as those of mathematicians, poets, and musicians, but differently arranged and combined. In earlier times, when there was a rage for physiognomy, a Gall might have dissected the brains of such chess champions to determine whether there was a special convolution in their gray matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump more strongly marked than in the skulls of others. And how excited such a physiognomist would have been by the case of a Czentovic, in whom this narrow genius seems embedded in absolute intellectual inertia like a single gold thread in a hundred-weight of barren rock. In principle I have always found it easy to understand that such a unique, ingenious game would have to produce its own wizards. Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess book—someone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!

  And now that one such phenomenon, one such strange genius or mysterious simpleton was for the first time physically quite nearby, six cabins away from me on the same ship, alas! I, for whom curiosity about things of the mind is more and more becoming a kind of passion, was unable to approach him. I began to think up the most absurd ruses: I would tickle his vanity by pretending to interview him for an important newspaper, perhaps; or pique his avarice by proposing a lucrative tournament in Scotland. But finally I remembered a hunter’s trick, that the most reliable technique for decoying the wood grouse was to imitate its mating call. What could be more effective in attracting the attention of a chess champion than to play chess oneself?

  Now I have never in my life been a serious chess player; my dealings with the game have been purely frivolous, for pleasure alone. If I spend an hour in front of the board, this is by no means to exert myself but, on the contrary, to relieve emotional tension. I “play” chess in the truest sense, while the others, the real chess players, “work” it, if I may use the word in this daring new way. But, in chess as in love, a partner is indispensable, and at that time I did not yet know if there were other chess lovers on board apart from us. To lure them out of their holes, I laid a primitive trap in the smoking room. Though my wife’s game is even weaker than my own, she and I, the bird-catchers, sat at a chessboard. And in fact someone passing through paused for a moment before we had made even six moves and a second asked permission to look on; finally the desired partner turned up too, and challenged me to a game. His name was McConnor, a Scottish civil engineer who, as I soon heard, had made a fortune in oil drilling in California. To the eye he was a thickset individual with heavy, well-defined, almost rectilinear jowls, strong teeth, and a high complexion whose pronounced ruddiness was probably at least partly due to plenty of whisky. The strikingly broad, almost athletically powerful shoulders unfortunately reflected the character of his playing too, for this Mr. McConnor was one of those self-obsessed big wheels who feel personally diminished by a defeat in even the most trivial game. Accustomed to ruthlessly asserting himself in life and spoiled by actual success, this un-yielding self-made man was so unshakably imbued with a sense of his own superiority that any resistance infuriated him, as though it were some inadmissible revolt, practically an affront. When he lost the first game, he grew sullen and began proclaiming, dictatorially and longwindedly, that this could only have happened because his attention had wandered for a moment; he blamed his failure in the third game on noise from the next room. He was unable to lose without immediately demanding a return match. At first I was amused by this dogged pride; finally I accepted it as an unavoidable side effect of my real purpose, to lure the world champion to our table.

  On the third day the plan succeeded, or partly. Whether Czentovic had looked through the porthole on the promenade deck and seen us in front of the chessboard or had just happened to honor the smoking room with his presence—in any event, as soon as he saw two incompetents practicing his art, he was compelled to step closer and while maintaining a careful distance cast an appraising glance at our board. McConnor was just then making a move. And even this one move seemed to be enough to tell Czentovic that it would be unworthy of a master like him to take any further interest in our amateurish efforts. As naturally as any of us might toss aside a bad detective novel in a bookstore without even opening it, he walked away from our table and out of the smoking room. “Weighed in the balance and found wanting,” I thought, a little annoyed by this cool, contemptuous gaze; to some
how give vent to my ill-humor, I said to McConnor:

  “The champion didn’t seem to think much of your move.”

  “What champion?”

  I explained to him that the gentleman who had just passed by and looked with such disapproval at our game was the chess champion Czentovic. Well, I added, the two of us would get over it, we’d come to terms with his lofty contempt without heartache; beggars couldn’t be choosers. But my offhand remark had a surprising and completely unexpected effect on McConnor. He immediately became agitated and forgot our game; you could almost hear the throbbing of his pride. He had had no idea that Czentovic was on board. Czentovic absolutely had to play him. He had never in his life played against a world champion except once in a simultaneous game with forty others; even that had been terribly exciting, and he had almost won. Did I know the champion personally? I said I didn’t. Wouldn’t I talk to him and ask him over? I refused on the grounds that, to the best of my knowledge, Czentovic was not very open to making new acquaintances. Besides, what would tempt a world champion to bother with third-rate players like us?

  Now I should never have made that remark about third-rate players to someone as proud as McConnor. He sat back in anger and brusquely declared that he for his part could not believe that Czentovic would refuse an invitation from a gentleman; he would see to that. At his request I provided him with a brief description of the world champion, and, abandoning our board, he rushed after Czentovic along the promenade deck with unbridled impatience. I felt again that anyone with such broad shoulders was not to be deterred once he had put his mind to something.

  I waited in some anxiety. After ten minutes, McConnor returned. He was not in good spirits, it seemed to me.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “You were right,” he responded, with some annoyance. “Not a very pleasant gentleman. I introduced myself, told him who I was. He didn’t even care to shake hands. I tried to explain to him how honored and proud all of us here on board would be if he would play us in a simultaneous game. But he was damn stiff-necked about it; said he was sorry, but he had contractual obligations toward his agent expressly prohibiting him from playing without a fee during his tour. He says his minimum is two hundred fifty dollars a game.”