The Royal Game

By Stefan Zweig

1942

Novella

Stefan Zweig's final work, also published in English as *Chess Story*, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher days before his suicide in 1942. A passenger steamer carries the boorish reigning world chess champion, Mirko Centovic, from New York to Buenos Aires. When wealthy amateurs on board challenge him to a game, a stranger — the enigmatic Dr B — intervenes and reveals he learned chess in solitary confinement under Gestapo interrogation, by stealing a book of grandmaster games and playing both sides against himself until his mind began to split. The resulting match between the mechanical champion and the brilliant, fractured outsider becomes Zweig's last and bleakest meditation on the violence the totalitarian state does to a creative mind.