A Story I Loved: "Chess Story" (“The Royal Game”) by Stefan Zweig
- Staff Writer
- Nov 9
- 4 min read
Writing about chess is almost impossible because it already comes preloaded with meaning. The board is a built-in metaphor, and because all these beautiful metaphors have already been exhaustively made, the best stories about chess can never be much about the game at all. The board can really only be a jumping-off point: we may immerse ourselves in it as any setup may allow us, any world that promises structure and consequence, but from there it is the author’s purview to take us further. Stefan Zweig, in Chess Story (otherwise known as “The Royal Game”), does just that.
We are introduced to our narrator, a polite, somewhat detached observer on a passenger ship bound for Buenos Aires. He’s a journalist, and so he does what journalists do best: he watches. When he learns that the world champion, Mirko Czentovic, is on board, his curiosity hardens into fascination. Czentovic is a marvel of stupidity, as some passengers note with disbelief, being a peasant who can’t write a proper sentence yet annihilates everyone he faces. He’s a perfect monster for the twentieth century. His gift is purely mechanical, brilliance without imagination. Another passenger then appears: an Austrian known only as Dr. B. He’s courteous, pale, visibly fragile. We learn he survived months of solitary confinement under the Gestapo, saved only by stealing a chess manual. With nothing else to do, he played matches against himself until his imagination split: one half attacking, the other defending.
Zweig, being somewhat of a moral psychologist himself, seems to have always been drawn to figures under a kind of obsessive fever—the “monomaniacs,” as he called them—people whose worlds revolve around a single point. He believed obsession could be both an escape and a slow death, and this game’s confinement, its tiny universe of sixty-four squares, its specificity to intellect, may make it terribly fitting (if not perfectly on the nose; chess masters are always considered such “mad geniuses” now— the Bobby Fischer effect) for embodying this contradiction. The narrower the field, the more infinite it becomes, but in that infinity waits madness. For Dr. B., chess begins as salvation, the only way to hold on to a sense of sequence, of cause and effect, but it slowly becomes the same structure that destroys him. There’s a brilliant case study of people in confinement here, the physical, mental, moral, and intellectual. Zweig’s a great writer in every technical sense of the word, but what makes him great to read in this story particularly is his empathy. He is beautifully generous: in terms of style, Zweig allows little sentimentality, his prose sharp and clean, almost cruel in its restraint, but he never mocks Dr. B. or even Czentovic. He wants to understand how people break and why, and he allows it to flow through his unraveling of these characters as figures existing for themselves, not for him. There is such love in that impulse. Zweig gives them dignity: he understands that obsession and devotion are two sides of the same coin, that faith and madness are separated only by what they serve. He knows that in every fixation there’s also a desperate reach for meaning. Chess Story was Zweig’s final completed work before his suicide in exile, and you can sense that exhaustion pulsing through it: the terror of order dissolving into chaos, of intellect becoming useless in a stupid age. The repetition that once keeps Dr. B. sane turns predatory. The same rules that give him meaning become a kind of madness. When he plays again, he is facing the version of himself that never left that cell more than he is facing Czentovic.
There’s a passage where the narrator calls chess “thought that leads to nothing, mathematics that produce no result, art without works.” I think this is so terribly and romantically precise. I, admittedly, love chess (though there may be limits to this in my amateurish understanding—a naivete, perhaps), and this line captures something essential: that futility and its contained beauty that keeps players returning to the board. It’s what makes chess, in all its silence, feel like a language between people. Zweig finds a language that brings us close to that fever, that terrifying intimacy with perfection; the grandmasters may live the game in a way none of us ever will, but Zweig manages to translate that interior fire into something all the rest of us can feel, that any lover in any discipline can recognize. We see, through this, that Zweig also saw in chess what he saw in Europe: a dazzling system of rules that could no longer protect the people inside it.
Chess Story is about containment, the ways we build intricate, rule-bound worlds to survive a chaotic one, and how those same walls can become our prisons. The story’s compassion lies in its warning: that the mind can’t live on pattern alone, that reason without mercy becomes its own form of madness. By the end, the pieces have stopped moving, but the question stays: when the world collapses, where do you hide? For Zweig, the answer was the mind. And that, as this story proves, is the most dangerous refuge of all.
Read "Chess Story" here:
