(Image Credit: Penguin Books Australia)
Mirko Czentovic, by all accounts and ruminations is the most “accidental” world chess champion in the history of the game. The son of a poor South Slavonian boatman, whose modest craft had been run down one unfortunate night by a freight steamer carrying grain, Czentovic is taken in by the priest of the boy’s village as an extreme gesture of charity.
Dim in the head and slow to act, Czentovic doesn’t possess the ability to even parse through the pages of a book. However, the fortunes of the village bumkin undergoes an epochal shift when he beats a policeman at a game of chess left unfinished by the priest, who in the middle of the game is called to administer Extreme Unction to a dying woman.
Czentovic’ s fame spreads like wildfire and in no time, he rises to exalted heights by trouncing one grandmaster after another, before sealing his place at the highest pedestal of the game. However, along with fame, Czentovic is besotted with power and arrogance. Striding like a veritable colossus, Czentovic becomes aloof, unapproachable and begins plying his wares in exhibitionist fashion for extortionate sums of money.
On a voyage from New York to Buenos Aires, Czentovic hubris is put to the ultimate test in a singularly unexpected manner. Challenged to a game of chess by a buccaneering Irish passenger named McConnor for an extraordinary sum of two-hundred and fifty dollars (we are not talking about contemporaneous times here), Czentovic comfortably trounces his opponent, pockets his winnings, before spontaneously calling for another game. Just when it seemed as though the result of the second game would predictably take on the colour and contours of its predecessor, a man with a deathly pallour appears out of nowhere and begins offering suggestions to McConnor. To the jaw dropping bewilderment of everyone watching the game, and not least Czentovic himself, McConner escapes with a miraculous draw.
A chastised and sufficiently humiliated Czentovic throws down the gauntlet at the gentleman due to whose inspired appearance, McConnor was able to come out unscathed. Who is this unknown Messiah that had an answer to every move the world champion made? Was he also an unsung wizard of the game? Stefan Zweig’s answer would shake his reader to the very bones!
Assiduously juxtaposing wit with vitriol, Sweig crafts an absolute masterpiece. Both Czentovic and his unknown challenger represent all that is emblematic of human nature. An imperfect bundle of humility and hubris, arrogance and altruism, pretentiousness, and patience. Chess is also a more than subtle warning aimed at the perniciousness of obsession. Written during the period when Europe was sagging under the twin woes of excesses and tyranny, the book is a timely call for abhorring irrational obsessions and ill-directed addictions.
The game of chess as we know now is quite different from the one described by Sweig in marvelously reverential tones. The human element of the game is now overshadowed by computational power and brute force algorithm. For every Kasparov, there is a Deep Blue and certainly in the future for every Pragnananda and Magnus Carlson there may arrive a beast capable of putting even the formidable AlphaGo Plus to utter shame. However, there was a time when chess was a glorious testimony to the limitless imagination and ingenuity of the human mind. Sweig inhabited those wonderful and untainted times as can be gleaned from his superlative description of the game: “…And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it also not a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammed’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient, yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination: limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations, constantly developing, yet sterile: thoughts that lead nowhere, mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art…”
Although chess, as you knew it in your time, might certainly have changed Mr. Sweig, your immortal classic will continue to endure as long as the game itself remains alive. Both your book and the sixty-four squares on a board share the same longevity!