Šahovska novela

Everyone was amazed by a miracle when the disreputable doctor B., an Austrian emigrant on a passenger steamer from New York to Buenos Aires, almost accidentally played against the current world chess champion Mirko Čentović and with playful ease defeated the opponent who played mechanically, routinely. But the game of chess awakens memories of the terror of imprisonment in National Socialism and reopens a wound in the soul that once again threatens the mental health of Dr. B.

The novel about chess is considered the last and best-known work of Stefan Zweig, in the center of the plot of which there is a confrontation of unimaginable psychological abysses, which a former prisoner of the Gestapo carries within himself, with the superficial lifestyle of rich travelers. In the beginning, a game of chess is just a simple pastime, a profitable sport, but in the character of the prisoner, doctor B., who during his imprisonment was intensively engaged in chess, it acquires a deeper meaning.