Warning!! Spoilers!!
I read this short work in one go in my brother’s apartment in Oklahoma City. It only took one sitting to take it all in. And I immediately started a second read through after finishing. The sponge in between my ears had soaked up the last of my older brother’s Old Rasputin and we had just finished playing one (of many) heated games of Risk on his Xbox. My other older brother was there also, as well as a friend from Phoenix who worked in an airport and had the tendency to utilize the perks of being able to jump around from state-to-state literally on a day-to-day basis.
While I got some space and over-analyzed my many shortcomings at world domination (I lost every game of Risk pretty easily), my brother commented on how much he loved the strategy of the game, how it was like Chess in many ways.
I, the self-proclaimed defender of the beauty and perfection of Chess, shook my head smugly at the false comparison. There were just too many factors of chance at play with Risk, and when it came down to it, there were many aspects of strategy regarding Risk, but there was also a lot of luck involved. Chess on the other hand is relentless in its power to hold you accountable for every move you make–chance was left at the doorstop. If you lose at chess, it’s always your fault.
I had been converted over the years to join the Cult of Chess, despite occasionally wallowing in my maladroit abilities. I’m really not that good, but there’s a constant interest that keeps me playing anyways, and that generates a healthy respect for the grandmasters and masters of the chess world. I love reading about the sacrifice, discipline, intelligence, wisdom, strategy, and obsession the game asks of its very best players. And when my brother crudely compared Risk to Chess, I remembered that I had brought with me a short, 84-page translation of Stefan Zweig’s story on the subject. I decided to read it, sprawled out on the floor of my brothers apartment, amid the loud din of drunken jokes and boasts, during a much-needed four day weekend of debauchery and relaxation.
Now, this story functions largely as a metaphor, and not as a opportunity for chess lovers to get off at lavish descriptions of well developed games. Chess is only used as a vehicle for a much larger message being portrayed. I’m not entirely sure of the intricacies of that message, but I can provide some crude thoughts on what I noticed. The most prominent features of the story are: Nazi Germany’s attempt at world domination and those who resisted their tyrannical reign, the role of the imagination, the infinite, and of course the psychological effects of being obsessed with chess.
To start, a brief synopsis will be provided:
What do you get when an author writes a story about a lengthy train ride and adds diverse characters? Usually, in the right hands, you get an interesting trip through the spectrum of possible psychological profiles. And this is the case in Chess Story. The author very easily renders the most interesting facets of each player’s personalities in the story.
We have the “simple-minded savant” turned world champion of Chess, the braggart with delusions of grandeur, the soft-spoken protagonist with a very keen attention to detail, and the star of the story, the oppressed and psychologically scarred Doctor B. who has a very interesting history with chess and who is by design crucial to the central chess game that is played.
Basically, the plot hinges on the braggart challenging the world champion to a game of chess. The champion is indifferent, often making his moves and pacing around the car of the train the game takes place in. Within the interim of decided moves, a stranger starts whispering the right positions to counteract the champion’s relentless offensive. The champion is out of earshot, he doesn’t suspect that he is actually playing a far better player, until he puts it together. The champion draws the match. And once the less than adept players catch whiff that they are in the presence of not one, but two very skilled players, they demand to know how it’s possible that this man could have possibly drawn a match against the world’s best player. This is when the true story starts, and it was the complexity and depth of his story that leaped out at me.
Doctor B’s description of the psychological torment he suffered through, and how chess saved him, despite fracturing his identity in the process, was worth reading through a couple more times. And through a hellacious tour of the infinite and timeless, Doctor B becomes a seasoned player out of necessity to keep his sanity.
He is taken hostage by the Nazi’s but instead of being sent to a concentration camp, he is sent directly into the maw of the beast: the Gestapo headquarters. He was sent there for “the most exquisite isolation imaginable” (41). What at first seemed a reasonable place to stay, in comparison to the horrible conditions of a concentration camp, became a display of “complete nothingness, physically and psychologically” (42). The room has a bed, a washbasin, a barred window, and nothing else. No books, no newspaper, no object for a mental stimulation, just a whitewashed void capable of ripping apart every seam of his being through the monotony of nothingness. He describes it likes this:
“You waited, waited, waited, thinking, thinking, thinking, until your temples throbbed. Nothing happened. You were alone. Alone. Alone” (43).
And in one of the most devastating portions of the book (to me at least), he explains that he almost wished he had been sent to a concentration camp instead, because he would have at least “seen faces…a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything,” instead of the “terrible sameness” of his hotel room (46). The “pressure of nothingness” is so great that he expresses a wish to be crammed together with other breathing bodies in a FUCKING concentration camp, even though the outcome was especially grim and the circumstances were bound to be horrific (46).
But alas, hope springs for Doctor B in the form of a stolen chess anthology, which details 150 of the most famous games from a diverse array of seasoned chess players. And the remedy for timelessness and the pressure of nothingness becomes a book of already played chess games. A book that recharges the psychological batteries of the Doctor, but at a price.
After a few months, our hapless hero grows bored of every memorized chess match. He estimates that he has worked through each game a dozen times. Soon he looks to his own creativity and imagination, he looks internally to the deep recesses of his mind. He starts to play against himself.
He describes the absurdity of battling ones self. To truly look to win against yourself and divide some tangible part of your identity as a means for company, produces a strange sensation he calls “artificial schizophrenia” (62). Playing through the master’s game was nothing but an act of “recapitulation” , but to enact a “self-division” made for ample opportunity to lose one’s “footing and fall into the abyss” (60-61). And he eventually does slip, but his trip to the abyss generates the opportunity to escape the clutches of his oppressors. He wakes up in a hospital and the Nazi’s deem him unfit for conveying any sort of reliable information.
He has escaped. He used his imagination to fight against a largely unimaginative and rigid tyrannical mechanism that was Nazi Germany, and the final chess battle, conveniently, the world champion who can’t imagine a chess board and who is an oaf away from the 64 black and white pieces, is beaten. But this isn’t without a price. Doctor B’s psychological identity has splintered. One game with the champion is all he can take before exhibiting the same symptoms he had back in his hotel room of nothingness. And although the timelessness he tapped into, the void, the ability to truly imagine and survive through the extreme channeling of the mind has allowed him to triumph through sheer will, he lost something valuable along the way.
My rating: 4.6 out of 5
Bibliotropism 