A Chess Story

First published posthumously in 1942, Stefan Zweig’s A Chess Story is a taut, unsettling novella written in Brazilian exile during the final years of the author’s life. Aboard an ocean liner travelling from New York to Buenos Aires, the formidable world chess champion Mirko Czentovic encounters Dr B., an enigmatic Austrian whose extraordinary skill conceals a devastating history of Nazi imprisonment and psychological isolation. As their match unfolds, chess becomes both an intellectual duel and a means of exploring the fragile boundaries between genius, obsession and madness.

Among Zweig’s most concentrated works, the novella brings his acute psychological insight to bear on the violence of totalitarianism and the resourcefulness of the human mind under extreme duress. Its elegant structure and mounting suspense transform a game of strategy into a meditation on solitude, freedom and the terrible cost of survival.

From the book

“But is it not already an insult to call chess merely a game?”

— Stefan Zweig, A Chess Story

On A Chess Story

“Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game.”

— The Economist