Stefan Zweig - The Royal Game

“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!

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