Two gentleman face each other across a chessboard. One is a world champion, leaning back in his chair. The other, an amateur player, is sweating bullets. It is the late 1930s, they are on a great passenger steamer from New York to Buenos Aires. Behind the amateur are a dozen spectators, fidgeting like extras watching a duel in a Kurosawa movie. Suddenly, a voice cries out. The move the amateur would've played is a blunder. The audience turns to the interloper, astonished. This is Stefan Zweig's Scachnovelle.
An Austrian Jew born in the year that Dostoevsky died, Zweig's most prolific period was in the 1920s, before the rise of fascism in Germany. Like his contemporary Kafka, He wrote exclusively in German, and while his novels were translated and enjoyed great popularity, he was forgotten by the Canon after his double suicide in Brazil (I suddenly think of the ending of Los suicidas). Thanks to the NYRB, we're able to read a wonderful English translation of his final work, Scachnovelle, or Chess, The Royal Game, Chess Story, by the talented Joel Rotenberg. Widely considered his masterwork, it was written during Zweig's final years in Petropolis, Brazil, in the early years of WWII.
Short and concise in length and prose, Zweig shows his mastery in depicting the psyche. Scachnovelle is about two master chess players on a ferry. The first, Czentovic, is an prodigy and the world champion. But the real protagonist is Dr. B., a lawyer who was arrested by the fascists in Austria and memorised hundreds of chess games. By separating his mind into two personas, he plays countless games against himself and reaches mastery at the detriment of his psyche to "chess poisoning". I can't help but compare Zweig to Dostoevsky - indeed, he greatly admired him along with Balzac and Dickens. But while he resembles his predecessors in depicting psychological minutiae with great accuracy, it's hard to pinpoint what Scachnovelle is actually about.
Perhaps we can find meaning in the almost comical juxtaposition of the two main characters. Czentovic is an idiot savant, knowing how to do nothing except play chess. The novel even begins with a long exposition about him, fooling the reader into thinking that it will be a character study of this unlikeable genius. On the other hand we have Dr. B., who is eternally tortured by the chess game and the trauma of being detained by the Gestapo. Daviau and Dunkle argue that the "second level of meaning" in the novel is "the eternal conflict between monomaniacal brute force(tyrannical political power) and the humanist" (376). Czentovic is definitely monomaniacal. He is comically inept at everything besides chess, and is unable to mentally visualise the chess positions on a board. But Dr. B.'s humanist symbolism is complicated by his chess poisoning and anxiety. He is by no means a perfect figure of humanism.
OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW
As the humanist vs monomaniac symbolism collapses, we view the two players as romantic versus modern. The novel appears at the cusp of the modern, right before a great shift of the Zeitgeist after WWII. As such the Narrator still takes on a Romantic view of the royal game: "[Dr. B.] had defeated the strongest chess player on earth in open battle!"(77)... "situate the field of battle" (16)... "the perils and rigors of attack and defense" (58)... "regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect" (20). Zweig's narrator uses lofty and hyperbolic language to create the imagery of players as generals commanding grand armies, attacking and counter-attacking and feinting in a mental battle of wits to gain the upper hand.
This is not hyberbole. It's how chess was played in the Romantic period: flashy sacrifices, audacious pawn pushes and heroic checkmates. One only has to look back at those games to see the difference between Romantic games like "The Immortal Game" (Anderssen vs Kieseritzky, 1851) or perhaps the most famous and romantic game of all time, "Fatal Attraction" (Lasker vs Thomas, 1912) and modern games, "Bad Pistyan" (Alekhine vs Bogoljubov, 1922).
"Bad Pistyan" is the game alluded to in Scachnovelle. While first two games end with beautiful, flashy checkmates, "Pistyan" ends with a resignation because of material deficit. This is the modernisation of chess. More theoretical, more academic, less risky, and consequently, more boring as a spectator sport.
In my reading of Scachnovelle, Czentovic represents Romantic chess corrupted by capitalism; Dr. B. represents Modern chess corrupted by theory. Neither player has the harmonious balance of Stofftrieb (material drive) and Formtrieb (formal drive) (Oltermann 172).
Oltermann points out that both ideals are "corrupted" in the novel. For 18th century writers like G.E. Lessing, chess was a metaphor for "enlightened conversation", to "converse across the black and white squares" and demonstrate one's Verstand (mind/spirit). Czentovic hardly embodies this. He is socially inept and plays only for monetary gain, fulfulling only the Stofftrieb (material drive). Dr. B. isn't without fault either, relying too much on the theoretical.
we soon come to realise that in spite, or perhaps because, of his »Geistlichkeit«, B. makes an ineffective opponent against the physical power of Czentovic’s play. B.’s obsessive, highly theoretical approach to the game, induced by his confined imprisonment, means that he is not just a contrast, but literally the polar opposite of Czentovic.
The modern, theoretical player has not reached harmonious balance either. Dr. B.'s chess playing is hardly an engine for conversation. His entire experience with a game consists of memorising positions in a Nazi prison and memorising theoretical positions. The greatest deviation from Lessing here is the crime of egoism, for chess cannot be played by one person. The Dr. corrupts the game by splitting his psyche in two so he can practise with himself, causing chess poisoning.
And it's not just chess, over the last 50 years every sport has been optimised and optimised. We can solve Rubiks cubes in 3 seconds now, MMA fights and boxing often win by points instead of flashy knockouts, football is the most boring it's ever been with everyone parking the bus after scoring one goal. Perfect information through rapid dissemination has made everything exceedingly boring. But I'd argue that even as sports have hypermodernised, there's still a lot of potential. Amateur football and sports are still entertaining to play and watch. Chess is still fun, played over a board a friend or stranger with no stakes. Lessing's poetics of chess as conversation still work, you just have to avoid playing competitively. People have invented four-player chess and Chess960 to avoid boring, overly theoretical positions (Ruy Lopez), bringing back the romanticism of the 18th century.
Stefan Zweig wrote Scachnovelle during the cusp of modernity. Chess was in its transformation from Romantic flamboyance to Modern theoretical play. Both players represent the "corrupted" game, but outside the novel, we still find hope. The royal game evolves beyond monomaniacal obsession and theoretical optimisation, only if we choose which version to play.
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Works Cited
Daviau, Donald G., and Harvey I. Dunkle. “Stefan Zweig’s ‘Schachnovelle.’” Monatshefte, vol. 65, no. 4, 1973, pp. 370–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30155131. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.
Oltermann, Philip. “Endgames in a ›Hypermodern‹ Age: Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle Reconsidered.” KulturPoetik, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 170–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26422466. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.