Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

  “Then came the interrogation. It took more effort on my part than ever, for when I answered I was actually concentrating with all my power not on what I was saying but first and foremost on keeping hold of the book without attracting attention. Fortunately the interrogation was brief this time, and I carried the book safely to my room—I won’t trouble you with all the details; there was a dangerous moment when it slipped down out of my trousers in the middle of the corridor and I had to simulate a severe fit of coughing in order to bend down and push it safely under my belt again. But on the other hand what a moment it was when, still carrying the book, I stepped back into my hell, alone at last and yet no longer alone!

  “Now you’ll probably think that I immediately seized the book, examined it, and read it. Not at all! First I wanted to savor to the full the anticipatory pleasure of having a book, the artificially prolonged delight, with a wonderful arousing effect on my nerves, of imagining the stolen book in detail, imagining what sort of book I’d most like it to be: closely printed above all, with many, many characters, many, many thin pages, so there would be more to read. And then I wanted it to be a work that required intellectual effort, nothing shallow, nothing easy, but something you could study, learn by heart, poems, and preferably—I had the audacity to dream of such a thing—Goethe or Homer. But finally I could no longer control my eagerness, my curiosity. Stretched out on the bed, so that the guard wouldn’t catch me by surprise if he suddenly opened the door, I tremblingly brought out the volume from under my belt.

  “When I saw the book, my first reaction was disappointment, even a kind of bitter anger: this book, captured at such atrocious risk and safeguarded with such ardent expectation, was nothing more or less than a sourcebook for chess players, an anthology of a hundred fifty master games. If I hadn’t been behind bars I would have hurled it through an open window in fury, for what was I supposed to do, what could I do with this nonsense? Like most schoolboys, I had occasionally been driven by boredom to give chess a try. But what good was this theoretical rubbish? You can’t play chess without another player and certainly not without pieces, without a board. Morosely I turned the pages, hoping I might still find something readable, a preface, some instruction; but I found nothing but plain square diagrams of each of the master games and underneath them symbols that were incomprehensible to me at first, a2–a3, Nf1–g3, and so on. It all seemed to me like a kind of mathematical code, to which I lacked the key. I only gradually deciphered it: to designate the positions of the pieces, the letters a, b, c, etc. stood for the vertical rows and the numerals 1 through 8 for the horizontal rows; so that these diagrams, though schematic, had a language all the same. Perhaps, I thought, I could construct a kind of chessboard in my cell and then try to play these games through; like a sign from heaven it came to me that my bedspread happened to have a large checkered pattern. If you folded it properly, you could eventually produce an arrangement of sixty-four squares. So the first thing I did was to hide the book under the mattress, having torn out the first page. Then I began to fashion chess pieces, the king, the queen, and so on, out of crumbs of bread I had saved; the results were of course absurdly crude, but, after interminable effort, I was finally able to set about reconstructing on the checkered bedspread the positions depicted in the book. But when I tried to play through an entire game with my ridiculous crumb chessmen, half of which I had darkened with dust to set them apart from the others, at first I failed totally. During those early days I was constantly becoming confused; I had to start this one game from the beginning over and over again—five times, ten times, twenty times. But who under the sun had so much unoccupied and unoccupiable time as I, the slave of nothingness? Who had such infinite reserves of desire and patience? After six days I played the game perfectly all the way through; after another eight days I didn’t even need the crumbs on the bedspread to make the positions in the book real to me; and after eight more days I could do without the checkered bedspread—the symbols in the book, a1, a2, c7, c8, which had been abstract at the beginning, automatically turned into visible, three-dimensional positions in my head. The transformation was total: I had created an internal projection of the chessboard and pieces and was able to see any position based on nothing more than the formulas in the book, the way an expert musician has only to glance at a score to hear all the voices and their harmonization. After another fourteen days I was able to play through every game in the book effortlessly and by heart—I played ‘blind,’ to use the technical term; only now was I beginning to understand what an immeasurable boon my brazen theft had gained for me. For suddenly I had something to do—something meaningless, something without purpose, you may say, but still something that nullified the nullity surrounding me; I possessed in these one hundred fifty tournament games a marvelous weapon against the oppressive monotony of my environs and my existence. To keep this new activity exciting, I began to map out my day precisely: two games in the morning, two games in the afternoon, then a quick recap in the evening. So my day, otherwise as formless as jelly, was full, I was busy, without becoming tired, for chess had the marvelous merit that, because the intellectual energies were corralled within a narrowly circumscribed field, even the most strenuous mental effort did not tire the brain, but rather increased its agility and vigor. At first I played the games through quite mechanically; yet gradually a pleasurable, aesthetic understanding awoke within me. I grasped the fine points, the perils and rigors of attack and defense, the technique of thinking ahead, planning moves and countermoves, and soon I was able to recognize the personality and style of each of the chess masters as unmistakably as one knows a poet from only a few of his lines; what had begun as no more than a way to pass the time was becoming a pleasure, and the figures of the great chess strategists—Alekhine, Lasker, Bogoljubov, Tartakower, and the rest—became beloved companions in my solitude. Each day my silent cell was filled with ceaseless novelty, and the very regularity of my exercitia restored the acuity of my intellectual faculties: I felt my mind refreshed, even honed, so to speak, by the constant mental discipline. The fact that I was thinking more clearly and coherently was especially evident during the interrogations. At the chessboard I had unconsciously perfected a defense against false threats and concealed tricks; from then on I no longer let down my guard during the questioning, and it even seemed to me that the Gestapo men were beginning to regard me with a certain respect. They had seen all the others break; perhaps they were quietly wondering what secret wellspring had given me alone the strength for such unshakable resistance.

  “This happy time continued for about two and a half or three months: day after day I systematically played through the hundred fifty games in that book. Then, unexpectedly, I came to a standstill. Suddenly I was once again facing nothingness. For once I had played each game twenty or thirty times through, it lost the charm of novelty, of surprise, its previous power to excite, to arouse, was exhausted. What was the point of repeating over and over games whose every move I had long since learned by heart? As soon as I made the opening move, the succeeding ones automatically reeled off in my mind, there was nothing unanticipated, no suspense, no problems to solve. To keep myself busy, to create the demands and the distraction that I now couldn’t do without, I would actually have needed another book with different games. But since this was completely impossible, there was only one way to continue with this strange diversion: I had to make up new games to replace the old ones. I had to try to play with, or rather against, myself.

  “Now I don’t know how much thought you have given to what goes on intellectually in this most remarkable of games. But a moment’s reflection should be enough to tell you that in chess, a game of pure reasoning with no element of chance, it is a logical absurdity to want to play oneself. The basic attraction of chess lies solely in the fact that its strategy is worked out differently in two different minds, that in this battle of wits Black does not know White’s schemes and constantly seeks to guess them and frustrate them, while White i
n turn tries to outstrip and thwart Black’s secret intentions. Now if Black and White together made up one and the same person, the result would be a nonsensical state of affairs in which one and the same mind simultaneously knew and did not know something, in which as White it could simply decide to forget what it had wished and intended to do as Black a moment earlier. In fact what is presupposed by this kind of duality of thought is a total division of consciousness, an ability to turn the workings of the brain on or off at will, as though it were a machine; playing chess against oneself is thus as paradoxical as jumping over one’s own shadow. Well, to make a long story short, in my desperation I attempted this impossibility, this absurdity, for months. Illogical as it was, I had no other choice if I was not to lapse into absolute madness or total intellectual inanition. My awful situation was forcing me to at least try to divide myself into a Black Me and a White Me in order not to be crushed by the horrendous nothingness around me.”

  Dr. B. leaned back in his deck chair and closed his eyes for a moment. It was as though he was trying to forcibly repress a disturbing memory. Again there was the strange uncontrollable twitch at the left corner of his mouth. Then he drew himself up a little higher in his reclining chair.

  “So—I hope I’ve been fairly clear so far. But unfortunately I’m not at all certain that I can make you see the rest of it as clearly. For this new occupation required such total mental exertion that it became impossible to keep a grip on myself at the same time. I said that I think it’s inherently absurd to want to play chess against yourself; nevertheless, this absurdity would stand a minimal chance if you had a chess-board in front of you, because the board’s reality would give it a certain distance, some outward substance. In front of a real chessboard with real pieces you can stop to think, you can physically position yourself first on one side of the table, then on the other, considering the situation first from Black’s standpoint, then from White’s. But obliged as I was to project this battle against myself (or with myself, if you like) within an imaginary space, I was forced to keep the current position on the sixty-four squares firmly in my mind’s eye, and compute not just the present configuration, but also the possible later moves of both players, and even—I know how absurd it all sounds—to visualize them twice and three times, no, six times, eight times, twelve times, for each me, for Black and for White, four and five moves ahead. Playing in the abstract realm of the imagination, I had to (excuse me for putting you through this madness) compute four or five moves ahead both as Player White and as Player Black, that is, I had to think through the situations that might arise in the development of the game so to speak with two minds, my white mind and my black mind. But the most dangerous thing in my abstruse experiment was not even this self-division, but the fact that devising games on my own was suddenly causing me to lose my footing and fall into the abyss. Playing through the master games as I had done in previous weeks was ultimately no more than an effort of repetition, a mere recapitulation of existing material, and as such no more strenuous than learning poetry by heart or memorizing sections of the legal code; it was a limited, disciplined activity and for that reason an excellent mental exercise. The two games I ran through every morning and every afternoon represented a set pensum which I completed without becoming agitated; they took the place of a normal occupation, and, further, if I made a mistake in the course of a game or forgot how to go on, I always had the book. The only reason that this activity had become such a salutary and even soothing one for my shattered nerves was that playing through games that were not my own did not involve me personally; it was all the same to me whether Black or White won, it was Alekhine or Bogoljubov who was battling for the laurels of the champion, and I as a person, my intellect, my spirit took part solely as an observer, as a connoisseur of the peripeteias and the beauties of each game. But from the moment I began to play against myself, I began unwittingly to challenge myself. Each of my two selves, the black one and the white one, had to vie against the other, and each conceived its own ambition, its own impatience, to gain the ascendancy, to win; after each move as White, I was in a fever to know what Black would do. Each of the two selves exulted when the other made a mistake and became exasperated at its own bungling.

  “All of this seems senseless, and in fact this kind of artificial schizophrenia or divided consciousness, with its admixture of dangerous excitation, would be inconceivable in a normal person under normal circumstances. But don’t forget that I had been forcibly wrenched out of any sort of normal life, I was a prisoner, unjustly held in captivity, exquisitely tormented with solitude for months, I had long wanted something upon which to vent my accumulated fury. And since I had nothing but this nonsensical playing against myself, my fury, my desire for vengeance was fanatically channeled into this game. Something in me wanted to come out on top, and yet all there was for me to fight was this other me in me; so as I played I worked myself up into a state of almost manic excitement. At the beginning my thinking was calm and considered, I took breaks between one game and the next in order to recover from my agitation; but gradually my frayed nerves refused to let me wait. My white self had no sooner made a move than my black self feverishly pushed forward; a game was no sooner over than I challenged myself to another, for one of the two chess selves was beaten by the other every time and demanded a rematch. I couldn’t even begin to say how many games this mad insatiability made me play against myself during these last months—a thousand, perhaps, maybe more. It was an obsession which I could not resist; from morning till night I thought of nothing but bishop and pawns and rook and king and a and b and c and mate and castling; my entire being and all my feeling were immersed in the checkered board. My pleasure in playing became a desire to play, the desire to play became a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenzy, which permeated not only my waking hours but gradually my sleep too. Chess was all I could think about, chess moves, chess problems were the only form my thoughts could take; sometimes I awoke with a sweaty brow and understood that I must have unconsciously gone on playing even while I slept, and if I dreamt of people, all they did was move like the bishop or the rook, or hopscotch like the knight. Even when I was summoned to an interrogation, I could no longer think coherently about my responsibilities; I have a feeling that during the final interrogations I must have expressed myself pretty confusedly, for the interrogators looked at each other with surprise. But while they asked questions and consulted with one another, all I was waiting for in my wretched craving was to be taken back to my cell so that I could go on with my playing, my insane playing, a new game and then another and another. Any interruption disturbed me; even the quarter of an hour while the guard cleaned the cell, the two minutes when he brought me my food, was a torment to me in my feverish impatience; sometimes the bowl containing my meal was still untouched in the evening; wrapped up in my playing, I had forgotten to eat. My only physical sensation was a terrible thirst; it must have been the fever of this constant thinking and playing; I drained the bottle in two gulps and pestered the guard for more, and yet my tongue was dry in my mouth a moment later. Finally my excitement while playing—and I did nothing else from morning till night—reached such a pitch that I could no longer sit still for a second; I walked up and down constantly while I thought about the games, faster and faster and faster, up and down, up and down, and more and more excitedly as a game’s critical point approached; my eagerness to win, to dominate, to beat myself, gradually became a kind of frenzy, I trembled with impatience, for one chess-self always found the other too slow. One urged the other on; as ridiculous as it may seem to you, I began to berate myself—‘Faster, faster!’ or ‘Go on, go on!’—when one me wasn’t quick enough with a counter-move. Today, of course, it’s entirely clear to me that this state of mine was a thoroughly pathological form of mental overstimulation, for which I have found no name but one heretofore unknown to medicine: chess sickness. Ultimately this monomaniacal obsession began to attack my body as well as my mind. I lost weight, my sleep
was troubled and fitful, when I woke up it always took special effort to force my leaden eyelids open; sometimes I felt so weak that when I held a glass it was all I could do to bring it to my lips, my hands were trembling so much; but as soon as I began to play, a furious energy came over me: I walked up and down with fists clenched, and I sometimes heard, as though through a red fog, my own voice addressing me with hoarse and ill-tempered exclamations of ‘Check!’ or ‘Mate!’