chess player

Author's name: Stefan Zweig

The Chess Player by Stefan Zweig... Stefan Zweig wrote to his friend Hermann Kitzen five weeks before his suicide: "I have nothing important to say about myself. I have written a short story according to my favorite, miserable model. It is too long for a newspaper or magazine, too short for a book, too obscure for a general readership to understand, and too strange for its subject matter." The story takes place on a ship sailing from the United States to Buenos Aires, where the world chess champion meets a stranger on the ship. The stranger tells the narrator his story with chess and then decides to play a match with the world champion, attended by all the passengers on the ship. The writer delves into the stranger's psychology, for the story carries within it something much more than a mere game of chess. It is a farewell letter to a world consumed by the lust for control and possession, and a stinging criticism of Nazism from his point of view, as one of its victims.