DERGİNİN SON HALİ

STEFAN ZWEIG CHESS
Chess Story is the story of a chess game.
In 1942, during the months of his exile in Brazil with his second wife, and
during the time that he and she played out master chess games in their
isolation, Stefan Zweig wrote his last book, completing it just days
before he and his wife’s double suicide. The narrator of the book is a
character in the story but not one of the two chess players and, like the
author, he is in exile. The game is played between the world champion
Czentovic and a Dr. B., the game arranged on a steamer to Buenos Aires.
The world champion Czentovic, orphaned young, took to chess and
absolutely nothing else, calculates magnificently, yet requires a board
and chessmen in front of him. Dr. B had been imprisoned and held in
isolation for a year prior to this where he had been playing chess in his
mind as a means to keep from breaking. He pilfers a book from one of
his interrogators after a few months of existing in a state of nothingness.
Hoping to find a book of poetry, it is 150 master chess games. He learns
to play the games in his head until they are all memorized. Then playing
against himself, considering even the guard bringing his food an
interruption, he becomes fuzzy during the interrogations because he
only wants to return to the isolation of his games and the anticipation of
black’s moves when he is white and white’s moves when he is black.
One wonders at first if it was just a dream that he played chess in his
mind in prison and he wonders too, having played only in his mind, will
he be able to sit at a board faced with a real player and be able to play.
The game between the two is climatic, one calculating on the board, one
in his mind, but the dualities don’t end there. The parts of Chess Story