What do you think?
Rate this book
The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, Journey into the Past
A casual introduction, a challenge to a simple game of chess, a lovers' reunion, a meaningless infidelity: from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales-meditations on the fragility of love, the limits of obsession, the combustibility of secrets and betrayal.To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing-which, with its unabashed intensity and narrative drive, made him one of the bestselling and most acclaimed authors in the world-is clear and irresistible. Each of these stories is a bolt of experience, unforgettable and unique. Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas includingLetter from an Unknown Woman ,Amok andFear . In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York - a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pity , and his memoir,The World of Yesterday . He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
385 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 29, 2015
101 people are currently reading
1490 people want to read
About the author
Stefan Zweig
2,305 books10.6k followersStefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
January 24, 2016
An interesting collection of 5 novellas, two of which I had read previously. In both cases, this second reading had been helpful in opening up Zweig's methods for me. As I read this collection I came to see, more and more, the manner in which he builds tension casually in his tales, through simple variations on everyday actions. A person may step away for a moment from a stifling situation, taking a refreshing or necessary break that somehow turns his/her life upside down and threatens their entire future. Of the five novellas only one, "Journey into the Past." did not create that tension for me and two of the ones that are new to me, "Fear" and "Confusion", both did it quite effectively. The others are "A Chess Story," as effective as when first read, and "A Burning Secret," somehow better than when I first encountered it.
Another thing I have learned from this collection is to have patience, to allow the writer to build up his characters and setting before providing the "meat" I am looking for. In this respect, perhaps I am a modern person/reader, wanting everything too quickly. The further removed I am from these stories, the more I realize that the tension I felt and found so effective simply would not have existed without that (seemingly) too slow build-up. So perhaps I am learning as a reader too.
I do recommend this book to those who enjoy Zweig and others who may be looking for a new author to try.
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Another thing I have learned from this collection is to have patience, to allow the writer to build up his characters and setting before providing the "meat" I am looking for. In this respect, perhaps I am a modern person/reader, wanting everything too quickly. The further removed I am from these stories, the more I realize that the tension I felt and found so effective simply would not have existed without that (seemingly) too slow build-up. So perhaps I am learning as a reader too.
I do recommend this book to those who enjoy Zweig and others who may be looking for a new author to try.
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
March 22, 2022
Across five novellas, Stefan Zweig probes the interior lives of his characters, particularly through the lens of passion.
In Burning Secret, a young baron makes a game out of trying to seduce a young mother at a countryside hotel only to reckon with her formidable and cunning son.
A Chess Story takes something as mundane as a chess match and puts it on par with some of the best sports dramas out there. An unconventional hero with a harrowing backstory goes toe to toe with a chess master in a game aboard a cruise ship.
After being discovered by her lover's girlfriend, a woman is blackmailed and pushed to the verge of madness in AFear.
Confusion is aptly named as a young lothario becomes obsessed with academics, particularly impassioned by his professor and the professor's wife as he gets caught in circumstances he finds hard to extricate himself from.
And finally in Journey Into the Past we see how a war separates two lovers and watch their awkward attempt to rekindle their passion after so much in their lives, and the world, has changed.
These five stories carried the weight of classics but had the readability of modern stories. They felt like tantalizing romances, cultural criticisms, and deep character studies all mixed together. Zweig is undoubtedly a master of prose. The sentences flow along like water and whisk you away. And wit a bit more substance than a short story without the commitment of a full novel, these five novellas were perfect companions for single sittings.
In Burning Secret, a young baron makes a game out of trying to seduce a young mother at a countryside hotel only to reckon with her formidable and cunning son.
A Chess Story takes something as mundane as a chess match and puts it on par with some of the best sports dramas out there. An unconventional hero with a harrowing backstory goes toe to toe with a chess master in a game aboard a cruise ship.
After being discovered by her lover's girlfriend, a woman is blackmailed and pushed to the verge of madness in AFear.
Confusion is aptly named as a young lothario becomes obsessed with academics, particularly impassioned by his professor and the professor's wife as he gets caught in circumstances he finds hard to extricate himself from.
And finally in Journey Into the Past we see how a war separates two lovers and watch their awkward attempt to rekindle their passion after so much in their lives, and the world, has changed.
These five stories carried the weight of classics but had the readability of modern stories. They felt like tantalizing romances, cultural criticisms, and deep character studies all mixed together. Zweig is undoubtedly a master of prose. The sentences flow along like water and whisk you away. And wit a bit more substance than a short story without the commitment of a full novel, these five novellas were perfect companions for single sittings.
February 23, 2018
There are five novellas in this collection: A Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion and Journey into the Past.
Most of these stories were written in the early part of the twentieth century – 1900 – 1920’s – and they have a real sense of a past world about them. However, what makes these novella’s still stand, is that the emotions felt by people don’t really change, whatever era they are written in. These stories encompass a whole range of feelings that we can all understand – ranging from adult secrets, obsession, jealousy, fear, longing, loss, pain and love…
Along the way, a boy grows up, a cruise ship sees a dramatic chess game, a married woman fears discovery after a brief affair, we read of forbidden love and of a romance separated by time and war. . I am pleased his writing has been re-discovered in recent years and it is easy to see why he was so popular. Zweig wrote beautifully – he is often criticised for being pedestrian, but what he does is actually tell a story and tell it well
Most of these stories were written in the early part of the twentieth century – 1900 – 1920’s – and they have a real sense of a past world about them. However, what makes these novella’s still stand, is that the emotions felt by people don’t really change, whatever era they are written in. These stories encompass a whole range of feelings that we can all understand – ranging from adult secrets, obsession, jealousy, fear, longing, loss, pain and love…
Along the way, a boy grows up, a cruise ship sees a dramatic chess game, a married woman fears discovery after a brief affair, we read of forbidden love and of a romance separated by time and war. . I am pleased his writing has been re-discovered in recent years and it is easy to see why he was so popular. Zweig wrote beautifully – he is often criticised for being pedestrian, but what he does is actually tell a story and tell it well
December 2, 2015
This book collects five of Stefan Zweig’s novellas: Chess, Fear, Confusion, Journey Into The Past and Burning Secret.
I became a Zweig fan after first reading Chess a few years ago – little did I realise that that was his only good book and the rest of his output is very poor! I am a Zweig fan no longer.
Fear and Confusion are tied as the worst novellas here. Fear is about an upper-middle class woman called Irene who has an affair with a young piano teacher and is blackmailed by her lover’s ex to keep quiet about it. The guilt drives Irene mad, the point of the story being how suffering in silence rather than being caught and punished is worse, but the reveal at the end of what it was all about is plain ridiculous. Melodramatic piffle.
Confusion is about a university student who doesn’t realise he’s gay for his teacher. They write a book about Elizabethan theatre and then the teacher disappears. What does it mean?! Anyone with a brain will know but our narrator is, for all his supposed education, a dumbass. This was the longest novella in the book and it was insufferable. Hardly anything happens and the ending isn’t just obvious, it’s underwhelming and boring too. Like Fear, Confusion is contrived horseshit through and through.
Burning Secret is only slightly better than the previous two with a similar approach of having a naive narrator but at least this one is 12 years old and not some unconvincingly innocent twenty-something! The kid and his single mother go to a holiday resort where a raffish fellow called the Baron decides to score with his hot mama. The kid at first thinks the Baron’s his buddy but slowly realises he’s using him to get into his mommy’s pants so he decides to get his own back by being the ultimate cockblock! It’s such a dreary story full of the kind of observations you wonder who they’re there for – too simple for grown-up readers and there aren’t going to be kids reading this!
I didn’t dislike Journey Into the Past much but I didn’t like it either. It’s about a man and woman reunited years after having an affair who try to rekindle that passion. It’s a well-observed psychological romance with overtones of the impending war as the Nazis rise to power though on the whole it still feels slight, unremarkable, and, like all things Zweig, strangely unmoving despite the emphasis on emotion.
Chess remains the best thing of Zweig’s I’ve read. I’ve read it twice since 2010 and still really like it. It’s about the world chess champion being challenged – and beaten – by a mysterious opponent nobody has ever heard of. Zweig’s story returns back to the horrors of fascist Germany, taking the reader into a Gestapo holding cell where the mystery man is interrogated for months. Chilling and compelling, Chess is a brilliant novella and the only one in the collection I’d say is worth checking out.
Zweig is a fine prose stylist who wrote beautiful sentences but his penchant for melodrama and literary posturing leads too many times to overwrought silliness in his often quite bare narratives. The effect of which leads to some surprisingly empty stories lacking the emotional impact he describes his characters going through that the reader can’t feel. This isn’t a worthwhile collection to get – I’d recommend interested readers pick up Chess instead. It’s not only better but far shorter than wading through the other four novellas of sludge.
I became a Zweig fan after first reading Chess a few years ago – little did I realise that that was his only good book and the rest of his output is very poor! I am a Zweig fan no longer.
Fear and Confusion are tied as the worst novellas here. Fear is about an upper-middle class woman called Irene who has an affair with a young piano teacher and is blackmailed by her lover’s ex to keep quiet about it. The guilt drives Irene mad, the point of the story being how suffering in silence rather than being caught and punished is worse, but the reveal at the end of what it was all about is plain ridiculous. Melodramatic piffle.
Confusion is about a university student who doesn’t realise he’s gay for his teacher. They write a book about Elizabethan theatre and then the teacher disappears. What does it mean?! Anyone with a brain will know but our narrator is, for all his supposed education, a dumbass. This was the longest novella in the book and it was insufferable. Hardly anything happens and the ending isn’t just obvious, it’s underwhelming and boring too. Like Fear, Confusion is contrived horseshit through and through.
Burning Secret is only slightly better than the previous two with a similar approach of having a naive narrator but at least this one is 12 years old and not some unconvincingly innocent twenty-something! The kid and his single mother go to a holiday resort where a raffish fellow called the Baron decides to score with his hot mama. The kid at first thinks the Baron’s his buddy but slowly realises he’s using him to get into his mommy’s pants so he decides to get his own back by being the ultimate cockblock! It’s such a dreary story full of the kind of observations you wonder who they’re there for – too simple for grown-up readers and there aren’t going to be kids reading this!
I didn’t dislike Journey Into the Past much but I didn’t like it either. It’s about a man and woman reunited years after having an affair who try to rekindle that passion. It’s a well-observed psychological romance with overtones of the impending war as the Nazis rise to power though on the whole it still feels slight, unremarkable, and, like all things Zweig, strangely unmoving despite the emphasis on emotion.
Chess remains the best thing of Zweig’s I’ve read. I’ve read it twice since 2010 and still really like it. It’s about the world chess champion being challenged – and beaten – by a mysterious opponent nobody has ever heard of. Zweig’s story returns back to the horrors of fascist Germany, taking the reader into a Gestapo holding cell where the mystery man is interrogated for months. Chilling and compelling, Chess is a brilliant novella and the only one in the collection I’d say is worth checking out.
Zweig is a fine prose stylist who wrote beautiful sentences but his penchant for melodrama and literary posturing leads too many times to overwrought silliness in his often quite bare narratives. The effect of which leads to some surprisingly empty stories lacking the emotional impact he describes his characters going through that the reader can’t feel. This isn’t a worthwhile collection to get – I’d recommend interested readers pick up Chess instead. It’s not only better but far shorter than wading through the other four novellas of sludge.
August 4, 2020
This particular review is only of the story Confusion. I have reviewed the previous stories separately.
Confusion is about a young man who becomes the student to a professor at the university he attends. The professor's expertise lies in Shakespeare's works. The student becomes obsessed with this professor and his work. Finally he rents a room in the same house the professor and his wife are living.
Things are strange. The wife is emotionally distant and sardonic. The professor is in turns, kind and gentle and caustic and cold. This puts the young man in turmoil. He doesn't know why the older man is treating him like this.
Also the professor takes to disappearing for a few days, telling no one of his whereabouts.
Furthering the mystery, his fellow students and the other professors have become cold toward the student and begun to exclude him from their circles.
Nothing is solved until the end, and I won't give it away, just to say, that I find so many things unrealistic and wrong about it.
Confusion is about a young man who becomes the student to a professor at the university he attends. The professor's expertise lies in Shakespeare's works. The student becomes obsessed with this professor and his work. Finally he rents a room in the same house the professor and his wife are living.
Things are strange. The wife is emotionally distant and sardonic. The professor is in turns, kind and gentle and caustic and cold. This puts the young man in turmoil. He doesn't know why the older man is treating him like this.
Also the professor takes to disappearing for a few days, telling no one of his whereabouts.
Furthering the mystery, his fellow students and the other professors have become cold toward the student and begun to exclude him from their circles.
Nothing is solved until the end, and I won't give it away, just to say, that I find so many things unrealistic and wrong about it.
August 7, 2016
Secrets. We have them, hide them and hedge them. Revelation results in a level of distress which we are not comfortable with. But sometimes even the most impenetrable of defences cannot hide them. Sometimes the secret itself burns the keeper from within, so much so that the only relief is release. Zweig is a master craftsman, building up stories around characters with secrets, dissecting their thoughts and feelings, exposing them in their behaviours and actions. Within each character is a complex sea of feelings to navigate. Amidst the internal conflicts and emotional turmoil, there is the universal question: Is this love? Or even what is love? The answer is not so straightforward, especially when it is a forbidden relationship. Compounding the confusion are feelings of guilt and shame, fear and anxiety. Can there be absolution or resolution?
Burning Secret
This is the bildungsroman of twelve year old Edgar, his coming of age story. The story is simple, but the relationships are not. Because of a previous carnal indiscretion by his father, the relationship between his parents grows cold. Although Edgar may be close to his mother, she is detached and isolated from him. She hides her loneliness and desperation behind a facade. Along comes the predator, the Baron, who beguiles both Edgar and Mama. Soon her defences fall, and she ventures to walk on the wild side. This has deep repercussions on Edgar as he embarks on a stormy emotional journey, from loneliness, to happiness, confusion, frustration, betrayal, anger, desperation, despair and reconciliation.
“He had lost all his impatience with life now that he knew how full of promise it was. He felt as if, for the first time, he had seen it as it was, no longer enveloped in the thousand lies of childhood, but naked in its own dangerous beauty. He had never thought that days could be so full of alternating pain and pleasure, and he liked the idea that many such days lay ahead of him, that a whole life was waiting to reveal its secret to him. A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings – they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them. He was unable to think of anything or anyone with hatred, he did not regret anything, and found a new sense of gratitude even to the Baron, the seducer, his bitterest enemy, because he had opened the door to this world of his first true emotions to him.”
If there is one thing to learn from this story, it is that marital relationships (or extra-marital), have the most profound effect on children.
A Chess Story
Already reviewed in “A Game of Chess and Other Stories”.
Fear
Irene had it all; a prosperous, professional husband, two children, a comfortable home with servants, a bourgeois lifestyle. Why put it all at risk in an extra-marital affair with a Don Juan she is not even attracted to? She does so and spends all her waking hours in fear. Fear of being discovered. Fear of losing what she had. Guilt each time she faces her husband. The burden is so great that it brings her close to confession, even to suicide. It is compounded by a stalker, a blackmailer, who threatens to shatter her perfect little world in an instant.
”She lay with her eyes closed to relish, at a deeper level, her real life or what it was, and it was now her happiness too. Something still hurt her, deep inside, but it was a promising pain, burning but mild, just as wounds burn when scar tissue is about to close over them forever.”
The story is as much about the consequences of infidelity, the burden of guilt as it is about love and forgiveness.
Confusion
A young protégé tries to make up for his earlier dissolute, misspent youth when an enigmatic professor takes him under his wing. He builds a relationship with his professor, and also with his professor’s wife. He immerses himself so deeply in his academic pursuits, such that he was oblivious to the real pursuit that was going on.
Journey into the Past
Another young protégé with great determination to be a success falls head over heels for his benefactor’s wife. Fate had other ideas and he is dispatched half way around the world to further his career. Although they are separated by thousands of miles and for nine long years, it is an invisible, unbreachable, moral and social wall which keeps them from consummating their love. Still he is haunted by the pleasant memories of their time together. When they finally have their reunion, the great void of distance and time disappears, and everything seemed to be as it was. They are older, but the feelings remain. The world outside is in chaos, but inside, nothing has changed.
Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres cherchent le passé.
In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast
Two spectres walk, still searching for the past.
This story is beautiful, nostalgic and poignant, a perfect ending for this collection of novellas.
Favourite!
Burning Secret
This is the bildungsroman of twelve year old Edgar, his coming of age story. The story is simple, but the relationships are not. Because of a previous carnal indiscretion by his father, the relationship between his parents grows cold. Although Edgar may be close to his mother, she is detached and isolated from him. She hides her loneliness and desperation behind a facade. Along comes the predator, the Baron, who beguiles both Edgar and Mama. Soon her defences fall, and she ventures to walk on the wild side. This has deep repercussions on Edgar as he embarks on a stormy emotional journey, from loneliness, to happiness, confusion, frustration, betrayal, anger, desperation, despair and reconciliation.
“He had lost all his impatience with life now that he knew how full of promise it was. He felt as if, for the first time, he had seen it as it was, no longer enveloped in the thousand lies of childhood, but naked in its own dangerous beauty. He had never thought that days could be so full of alternating pain and pleasure, and he liked the idea that many such days lay ahead of him, that a whole life was waiting to reveal its secret to him. A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings – they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them. He was unable to think of anything or anyone with hatred, he did not regret anything, and found a new sense of gratitude even to the Baron, the seducer, his bitterest enemy, because he had opened the door to this world of his first true emotions to him.”
If there is one thing to learn from this story, it is that marital relationships (or extra-marital), have the most profound effect on children.
A Chess Story
Already reviewed in “A Game of Chess and Other Stories”.
Fear
Irene had it all; a prosperous, professional husband, two children, a comfortable home with servants, a bourgeois lifestyle. Why put it all at risk in an extra-marital affair with a Don Juan she is not even attracted to? She does so and spends all her waking hours in fear. Fear of being discovered. Fear of losing what she had. Guilt each time she faces her husband. The burden is so great that it brings her close to confession, even to suicide. It is compounded by a stalker, a blackmailer, who threatens to shatter her perfect little world in an instant.
”She lay with her eyes closed to relish, at a deeper level, her real life or what it was, and it was now her happiness too. Something still hurt her, deep inside, but it was a promising pain, burning but mild, just as wounds burn when scar tissue is about to close over them forever.”
The story is as much about the consequences of infidelity, the burden of guilt as it is about love and forgiveness.
Confusion
A young protégé tries to make up for his earlier dissolute, misspent youth when an enigmatic professor takes him under his wing. He builds a relationship with his professor, and also with his professor’s wife. He immerses himself so deeply in his academic pursuits, such that he was oblivious to the real pursuit that was going on.
Journey into the Past
Another young protégé with great determination to be a success falls head over heels for his benefactor’s wife. Fate had other ideas and he is dispatched half way around the world to further his career. Although they are separated by thousands of miles and for nine long years, it is an invisible, unbreachable, moral and social wall which keeps them from consummating their love. Still he is haunted by the pleasant memories of their time together. When they finally have their reunion, the great void of distance and time disappears, and everything seemed to be as it was. They are older, but the feelings remain. The world outside is in chaos, but inside, nothing has changed.
Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres cherchent le passé.
In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast
Two spectres walk, still searching for the past.
This story is beautiful, nostalgic and poignant, a perfect ending for this collection of novellas.
Favourite!
December 23, 2021
Reading stories or novels as part of a collection inevitably influences how you read them and what you take from them. For me, it tends to go one of two ways: some stories are sapped of their power by proximity to other, related stories. Stories can interfere with each other, like waveforms cancelling each other out. Or the waveforms can align, amplifying the power of each individual story, and creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts—as in The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig.
Each of these five novellas is thrown into relief by the stories around it. The obsessive, over-heated quality of Zweig’s prose, which can feel tawdry or overdramatic taken one story at a time, becomes increasingly fascinating and nuanced with each additional novella. Settings—hotels and train stations and ocean liners—that might feel generic, taken one story at a time, aggregate into a kind of shadow world of unstable spaces, of worlds in motion. The stories with a strong political subtext—Journey into the Past and Chess Story—bring out the politics in the others, while adultery, which occurs in four of the five stories, settles into the background where it belongs, the primary concern of not a single one.
I reviewed separately Burning Secret, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past. Chess Story is deservedly famous—brilliant, thought-provoking, and surprising. But for some reason, it has resisted my powers as a reviewer. I simply can not seem to come up with anything interesting to say about it.
Each of these five novellas is thrown into relief by the stories around it. The obsessive, over-heated quality of Zweig’s prose, which can feel tawdry or overdramatic taken one story at a time, becomes increasingly fascinating and nuanced with each additional novella. Settings—hotels and train stations and ocean liners—that might feel generic, taken one story at a time, aggregate into a kind of shadow world of unstable spaces, of worlds in motion. The stories with a strong political subtext—Journey into the Past and Chess Story—bring out the politics in the others, while adultery, which occurs in four of the five stories, settles into the background where it belongs, the primary concern of not a single one.
I reviewed separately Burning Secret, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past. Chess Story is deservedly famous—brilliant, thought-provoking, and surprising. But for some reason, it has resisted my powers as a reviewer. I simply can not seem to come up with anything interesting to say about it.
February 9, 2024
Mučilo me koju ocenu da dam, ali nažalost ovaj put ide samo dobar, 3.
Volim Cvajga mnooogo, Beware of Pity obožavam, a Chess Story je verovatno jedna od mojih omiljenih kratkih priča. ALI... ova zbirka priča je bila samo... mnjeh (u nedostatku boljeg opisa).
Zbirka se sastoji od 7 novela (da, podvlačim i ovde, čitala sam novo Lagunino izdanje koje nije uneto na GR u trenutku pisanja ove rece) koje su mi sve bile za trunku (il' dve) previše patetične i preopširne. Dopale su mi se ideje i tematike koje Cvajg obrađuje (ponekad VRLO skandalozne za njegovo vreme), ali on to oduži na 10 strana previše i nekako se izgubi jačina poruke jer samo želim da poentira a ne da mi naniže pet prideva jedan do drugog i tako ukrug. Hvatala sam sebe više puta kako proveravam koliko stranica imam do kraja.
Ovo je mogla da bude baš sjajna zbirka, ali nažalost mi nijedna priča nije zasijala (možda eventualno Burning Secret, mada je i tu bio preopširan).
Volim Cvajga mnooogo, Beware of Pity obožavam, a Chess Story je verovatno jedna od mojih omiljenih kratkih priča. ALI... ova zbirka priča je bila samo... mnjeh (u nedostatku boljeg opisa).
Zbirka se sastoji od 7 novela (da, podvlačim i ovde, čitala sam novo Lagunino izdanje koje nije uneto na GR u trenutku pisanja ove rece) koje su mi sve bile za trunku (il' dve) previše patetične i preopširne. Dopale su mi se ideje i tematike koje Cvajg obrađuje (ponekad VRLO skandalozne za njegovo vreme), ali on to oduži na 10 strana previše i nekako se izgubi jačina poruke jer samo želim da poentira a ne da mi naniže pet prideva jedan do drugog i tako ukrug. Hvatala sam sebe više puta kako proveravam koliko stranica imam do kraja.
Ovo je mogla da bude baš sjajna zbirka, ali nažalost mi nijedna priča nije zasijala (možda eventualno Burning Secret, mada je i tu bio preopširan).
September 2, 2025
This collection of five novellas—A Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past—showcases the depth and emotional precision that define Stefan Zweig’s writing. Mostly written in the early 20th century, these works capture a mood of nostalgia while probing the complexities of human emotion.
Each story approaches its theme with psychological intensity: a boy’s uneasy transition into adolescence, a battle of minds over a chessboard on a cruise ship, a married woman consumed by the consequences of a brief affair, and lovers caught in the grip of time, distance, and war. Zweig deftly reveals the vulnerabilities of his characters—whether rooted in jealousy, obsession, longing, or fear—while maintaining a subtle, understated style.
At times melancholic and at others quietly devastating, these novellas remind readers why Zweig remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of passion and loss in modern literature.
Each story approaches its theme with psychological intensity: a boy’s uneasy transition into adolescence, a battle of minds over a chessboard on a cruise ship, a married woman consumed by the consequences of a brief affair, and lovers caught in the grip of time, distance, and war. Zweig deftly reveals the vulnerabilities of his characters—whether rooted in jealousy, obsession, longing, or fear—while maintaining a subtle, understated style.
At times melancholic and at others quietly devastating, these novellas remind readers why Zweig remains one of the most insightful chroniclers of passion and loss in modern literature.
Read
August 5, 2025I've read enough Zweig to notice a pattern, or a structure of his stories: the main character gets caught in some kind of psychological situation where their nerves are tested, and the tension builds as events escalate, and Zweig, going on a quest to explore the deepest level of the human mind, pushes the story toward a final resolution.
That pattern works well for his short stories and novels, but not quite as well for a novella. His short stories usually go ay perfect pacing, and the "psychological situation" presented are extraordinary: one hardly expects those situations in their daily life but somehow they're perfectly reasonable. His novels, while longer, still give just enough to keep you curious and turning the page.
His novellas, however, often feel lengthy in parts, and didn’t really urge me to explore the tension further. I was totally lost in Confusion, where there’s just an endless flow of words to describe something so small, and it never seems to move on to the next point. Naturally, I’m not an impatient reader, but at times I couldn’t shake the feeling that Zweig was going nowhere with the story.
Would I recommend this book? Well yes, the stories are still very much in Zweig’s style. But I’d suggest taking them one at a time, not all five in a row.
That pattern works well for his short stories and novels, but not quite as well for a novella. His short stories usually go ay perfect pacing, and the "psychological situation" presented are extraordinary: one hardly expects those situations in their daily life but somehow they're perfectly reasonable. His novels, while longer, still give just enough to keep you curious and turning the page.
His novellas, however, often feel lengthy in parts, and didn’t really urge me to explore the tension further. I was totally lost in Confusion, where there’s just an endless flow of words to describe something so small, and it never seems to move on to the next point. Naturally, I’m not an impatient reader, but at times I couldn’t shake the feeling that Zweig was going nowhere with the story.
Would I recommend this book? Well yes, the stories are still very much in Zweig’s style. But I’d suggest taking them one at a time, not all five in a row.
June 26, 2025
I'm not a fan of novellas or short stories or short fiction in any form. If I like something that I'm reading, I want to spend time with it and not have to adjust to a new story within a few pages or hours or however long the work lasts. That disclaimer noted, I enjoyed "The Collected Novellas" of Stefan Zweig very much and imagine that I'll be tackling his other Pushkin Press books (even "The Collected Stories") at some point soon.
Each of these novellas is a story about longing and the need for physical and/or spiritual connection. Yet human fallibility - whether it be a lack of honesty, lack of clarity, or lack of consideration for the needs of another - creates the crackling tension and undeniable allure of these stories. I'm not surprised that Zweig was one of the most celebrated writers of the 1920s and 1930s. His writing feels fresh, relevant, and still compelling almost a century later.
Each of these novellas is a story about longing and the need for physical and/or spiritual connection. Yet human fallibility - whether it be a lack of honesty, lack of clarity, or lack of consideration for the needs of another - creates the crackling tension and undeniable allure of these stories. I'm not surprised that Zweig was one of the most celebrated writers of the 1920s and 1930s. His writing feels fresh, relevant, and still compelling almost a century later.
January 11, 2025
chess story, you will always be famous
July 16, 2020
A collection of five of Stefan Zweig's thoughtful, emotional, and psychological novellas.
Book Review: The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig is a small treasure from the ever brilliant Pushkin Press. This was my introduction to the work of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and what a wonderful introduction it was. Five varied novellas from throughout his career: Fear (1910/1920), Burning Secret (1913), Confusion (1927), A Chess Story (1942), and Journey into the Past (1976). A Chess Story (his masterpiece) and Burning Secret are the best of the bunch, both unique and creative visionary works. Confusion (also known as Confusion of Feelings) is more average, at least to today's eyes, although it is a story with a message. It may have been more meaningful and powerful if I could have read it in 1927. Fear (aka Angst) and Journey into the Past are "smaller" works, each focusing on a narrower point and verging on melodrama. One-note works. In fairness, both do full justice to their vision. Both are stories with a heart and more emotion and feeling is better than less. The novella was Zweig's most effective art form. He made his stories just as long as they needed to be. Even in The Collected Stories not all of the works are "short stories." Zweig's specialty, his chosen subject, is a mix of the romantic (in all senses of the word), emotions, and psychology. What could be called "human nature." He finds the depths in the people he writes about, often considering the many possibilities a particular stress, pressure, or trauma might create. If they venture into the sentimental, so be it. All five works in The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig were ably and excellently translated by Anthea Bell. Although I don't speak German, having translated manuscripts I'm aware of the possible flaws (especially my own) in this secondary art. When reading translated works there are usually a number of "Is that the right word?" moments, indicating some (almost inevitable) communication breakdown between translator and author. There are few, if any at all, of these moments in the sensitive and capable hands of Ms. Bell. This diverse collection gives the reader a quick and valuable introduction to the range of Stefan Zweig's work. All these novellas have stuck with me. [5★]
Book Review: The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig is a small treasure from the ever brilliant Pushkin Press. This was my introduction to the work of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and what a wonderful introduction it was. Five varied novellas from throughout his career: Fear (1910/1920), Burning Secret (1913), Confusion (1927), A Chess Story (1942), and Journey into the Past (1976). A Chess Story (his masterpiece) and Burning Secret are the best of the bunch, both unique and creative visionary works. Confusion (also known as Confusion of Feelings) is more average, at least to today's eyes, although it is a story with a message. It may have been more meaningful and powerful if I could have read it in 1927. Fear (aka Angst) and Journey into the Past are "smaller" works, each focusing on a narrower point and verging on melodrama. One-note works. In fairness, both do full justice to their vision. Both are stories with a heart and more emotion and feeling is better than less. The novella was Zweig's most effective art form. He made his stories just as long as they needed to be. Even in The Collected Stories not all of the works are "short stories." Zweig's specialty, his chosen subject, is a mix of the romantic (in all senses of the word), emotions, and psychology. What could be called "human nature." He finds the depths in the people he writes about, often considering the many possibilities a particular stress, pressure, or trauma might create. If they venture into the sentimental, so be it. All five works in The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig were ably and excellently translated by Anthea Bell. Although I don't speak German, having translated manuscripts I'm aware of the possible flaws (especially my own) in this secondary art. When reading translated works there are usually a number of "Is that the right word?" moments, indicating some (almost inevitable) communication breakdown between translator and author. There are few, if any at all, of these moments in the sensitive and capable hands of Ms. Bell. This diverse collection gives the reader a quick and valuable introduction to the range of Stefan Zweig's work. All these novellas have stuck with me. [5★]
December 25, 2018
One of the most wonderful things I've ever ever read. That I ever hope to read. I don't see it on my friends reading lists but it should be for many reason, not the least of which is the spellbindingly virtuosic translation by Anthea Bell. READ IT READ IT READ IT. And if you find this little volume by Pushkin Press, it is a delight to hold and handle. Thank you PV for turning me on to Sweig! I didn't want it to end.
November 10, 2018
Brilliant collection of novellas! Loved them all!
September 12, 2025
“It is not in human nature to live entirely on memories, and just as the plants and every living structure need nourishment from the soil and new light from the sky, if their colors are not to fade and their petals to drop, even such apparently unearthly things as dreams need a certain amount of nourishment from the senses, some tender pictorial aid, or their blood will run thin and their radiance be dimmed.”
Holy moly, what a collection. Looking forward to discovering more of Zweig.
Holy moly, what a collection. Looking forward to discovering more of Zweig.
January 31, 2020
Topboek!
August 24, 2017
Stefan Zweig was one of the most popular writers of early twentieth-century Europe. After his books were banned and burned under Hitler and Zweig and his wife escaped to Brazil, where they committed suicide, he fell out of favor and his work essentially disappeared. Thanks to the amazing work of publishers like the New York Review of Books Classics and the Pushkin Press, writers like Zweig have come back to us (and it doesn’t hurt that Wes Anderson was inspired by Zweig to make Grand Budapest Hotel) and what an amazing rediscovery he offers. Zweig feels like the greatest chronicler of Freud’s Vienna, a world of bourgeois sexual repressions and class tensions. If Ibsen had written novels and short stories set in Mitteleuropa, they might look like this. What it really comes down to, though, is this: Zweig is a pure pleasure to read. Though he explores the same territory of miscommunication and self-deception as modernists like Ford Madox Ford, Zweig’s talents lie less in experimental narrative than in the construction of character and story. I am a slow reader, and I gulp these things down, compulsively. And I don’t want to stop. I’ve bought more books by the man. But this shouldn’t imply these are shallow. Far from it. Zweig gets the depths of humanity and conveys them beautifully. His posthumous novel, The Post-Office Girl, is a powerful, semi-revolutionary novel of class desperation that I highly recommend, but the five novellas offered in this collection have been the truest of reading pleasures, especially "A Chess Story," "Fear" and "Confusion." Much credit must also be given to the brilliant translator Anthea Bell. Plus, the Pushkin hardback volume is simply a joy to hold in your hands and cradle. It just feels like a book, if you know what I mean. I cannot recommend this enough. Welcome back Stefan Zweig.
April 6, 2022
Five novellas of varying length.
“The Burning Secret.” Very good. Starts from the perspective of a Baron on the prowl to get in the sack with a married woman and switches to the perspective of her 12-year-old son. Shifts from a light and humorous aspect to a darker perspective with more pathos and insights. A coming-of-age story of sorts.
“A Chess Story.” Perhaps the most famous story in there, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Like “The Burning Secret” it starts as a light-hearted tale being innocently-enough related and takes a turn to the darkly psychological.
"Fear." Didn't care for too much. The ending is ludicrous.
"Confusion." the longest of any of the novellas – was particularly interesting in many ways, especially for something published in 1927.
"Journey into the Past" is the shortest of the novellas. A nice little bittersweet mitteleuropa love story.
I enjoy Zweig's writing, but I think he over-writes a little. It seems to take him a thousand words to say what could be said in a hundred, and often with overheated, florid prose. We get the point well before he beats it into the ground. His stories are psychological, exploring the inner thoughts of the protagonists – and they’re typically very turbulent thoughts. Still, I found them all engaging enough to read them through to the end.
“The Burning Secret.” Very good. Starts from the perspective of a Baron on the prowl to get in the sack with a married woman and switches to the perspective of her 12-year-old son. Shifts from a light and humorous aspect to a darker perspective with more pathos and insights. A coming-of-age story of sorts.
“A Chess Story.” Perhaps the most famous story in there, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Like “The Burning Secret” it starts as a light-hearted tale being innocently-enough related and takes a turn to the darkly psychological.
"Fear." Didn't care for too much. The ending is ludicrous.
"Confusion." the longest of any of the novellas – was particularly interesting in many ways, especially for something published in 1927.
"Journey into the Past" is the shortest of the novellas. A nice little bittersweet mitteleuropa love story.
I enjoy Zweig's writing, but I think he over-writes a little. It seems to take him a thousand words to say what could be said in a hundred, and often with overheated, florid prose. We get the point well before he beats it into the ground. His stories are psychological, exploring the inner thoughts of the protagonists – and they’re typically very turbulent thoughts. Still, I found them all engaging enough to read them through to the end.
April 13, 2023
Reading Zweig is like sitting down to a perfect, elegant, Viennese pastry. Each piece is so carefully crafted. But it's the vivid and deeply worked psychology of the characters that stops this all just being so much fluff. Zweig is a humanist, deeply interested in the ideas of Freud as well as the hidden passageways of the human psyche. This lends his works a dream-like quality, though the writing is deliberate and well considered, like a pointillist painting.
Those looking for low-hanging fruit might chafe at the length of time and the care Zweig invests in setting out his stories. I certainly skimmed unashamedly the parts where characters start to waffle or gush at immoderate length. I remember that Zeig was writing for a much more severely stratified and repressed time than our own. A world of order, security, and (for the upper middle classes) reputation. A world that was to have the stuffing comprehensively knocked out of it in not just one but two world wars so close together. Something that Zweig witnessed first hand: the loss of innocence and naive faith in human progress. And this is for me where Zweig speaks to our own times most directly, for civilisation is indeed a very thin veneer (and has become thinner!) and human nature continues underneath it.
The final litmus test: do you remember the stories afterwards? Do they come back and taunt or tease you? With Zweig and for me, yes!
Five stars!
***** Great
**** Good
*** Fair
** Poor
* Dire
Those looking for low-hanging fruit might chafe at the length of time and the care Zweig invests in setting out his stories. I certainly skimmed unashamedly the parts where characters start to waffle or gush at immoderate length. I remember that Zeig was writing for a much more severely stratified and repressed time than our own. A world of order, security, and (for the upper middle classes) reputation. A world that was to have the stuffing comprehensively knocked out of it in not just one but two world wars so close together. Something that Zweig witnessed first hand: the loss of innocence and naive faith in human progress. And this is for me where Zweig speaks to our own times most directly, for civilisation is indeed a very thin veneer (and has become thinner!) and human nature continues underneath it.
The final litmus test: do you remember the stories afterwards? Do they come back and taunt or tease you? With Zweig and for me, yes!
Five stars!
***** Great
**** Good
*** Fair
** Poor
* Dire
April 9, 2023
a sublime experience :–
Zweig is a compelling writer and the novellas in this collection are all very well-written and moving; most of them shocking and haunting, others tender and soothing.
he deals much in desire, longing, beauty and motives -- many unspoken, unconscious, but equally volcanic -- the real and rather-melodramatically tragic charm of the bourgeoisie.
Zweig is a compelling writer and the novellas in this collection are all very well-written and moving; most of them shocking and haunting, others tender and soothing.
he deals much in desire, longing, beauty and motives -- many unspoken, unconscious, but equally volcanic -- the real and rather-melodramatically tragic charm of the bourgeoisie.
February 23, 2024
Zweig is a virtuoso of the written word (a fact made evident by the masterful translation of these novellas by Anthea Bell and Alexander Starritt).
Each story is its own universe; each narrative lives and breathes like its own creature. I have no notes.
Each story is its own universe; each narrative lives and breathes like its own creature. I have no notes.
December 1, 2020
reunião de cinco obras de zweig, escritas em momentos diferentes da sua vida. já conhecia "a chess story" e "confusion", mas bastava um qualquer desconhecido ter escrito as outras três novelas ("a burning secret", "fear" e "journey into the past"), obras-primas absolutas, para ganhar um lugar eterno no olimpo da literatura. um diálogo ou uma descrição assinados por zweig valem mais do que obras completas da maioria dos outros. se há alguém que eu gostaria de poder imitar - na sua prosa densa e luminosa ao mesmo tempo, na maneira de narrar uma história, na construção dos personagens, na sua escolha do adjectivo perfeito - era ele. um dos livros do ano (e dos para sempre).
September 27, 2024
Burning Secret: 5 stars
Chess Story: 5 stars
Fear: 4 stars
Confusion: 3.5 stars
Journey Into the Past: 2.5 stars
Chess Story: 5 stars
Fear: 4 stars
Confusion: 3.5 stars
Journey Into the Past: 2.5 stars
January 12, 2025
What a brilliant man
July 27, 2022
Completely unmissable! One of my favourite authors, I sometimes feel sad and guilty that I've devoured another of this collections/books so quickly, given that such a powerful and astute mind has written comparatively little.
His story is tragic, yet he finds the beauty and complexity in all around him.
His story is tragic, yet he finds the beauty and complexity in all around him.
Read
January 10, 2025Will be reading everything of Stefan Zweig i can find
December 16, 2025
Mental Games and Madness
On board a ship en route to Buenos Aires during World War II, the narrator discovers that the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, is also a passenger. His friend fills him in on Czentovic’s meteoric rise from an obscure peasant amateur to defeating the most talented, experienced players in the world. Which was all the more amazing because the young man had limited intellectual capacities: he couldn’t write a sentence or play chess from memory, playing “blind,” but must have a board to make his moves. In addition, “his play was dogged, slow, unshakeable” (95), never lifting his head from the board.
The boy’s talent had been unexpectedly discovered in a rural village on the Danube, where he had simply watched two amateurs play and then been able to take a seat and win games. This excited the local Graf, a chess fanatic, who agreed to subsidize his training in Vienna; “after six months, Mirko had mastered various secrets of chess technique” (97), and finally, at twenty, he became world champion. His singular accomplishment flew in the face of previous champions, whose ranks included an “illustrious pantheon of masters who united the most varied types of intellectual pre-eminence--philosophers, mathematicians, perceptive, ingenious or often creative minds,” while Czentovic was “a total stranger to the life of the mind” (98). In addition, his behavior remained crude and became marked by vulgar greed as his limited experience exposed him only to winning at chess and earning money by winning. He had no idea of other accomplishments that gained fame, no exposure to Rembrandt, Dante, or even Napoleon.
As it turns out, the narrator is fascinated by obsession, thinking that “the more a person restricts himself, the closer, conversely, he approaches to the infinite”…They are people who “build their particular obsessions into the most extraordinary and unique abbreviations of the world outside” (100). While a chess player’s obsession with his game might be excused as necessary for success, the fact that obsession itself poses possible dangers is not considered. This reality is overlooked by those enamored of the “royal game,” with its play devoid of chance, awarding “its laurels only to the intellect, or, rather, to a particular form of intellectual ability” (101). In fact, it may include aspects of science and art, providing “a unique synthesis of all opposites…its mechanical structure animated by the imagination…always developing yet ever sterile, a logic with no results…the only game that belongs in every era and among every people…Where is its beginning and where its end?” (101). The game has developed a specific type of genius, perhaps resulting from unique mental abilities, for it’s hard to imagine anyone with a normal mentality willing to reduce his life “to the cramped monotony of black and white…to whom a new opening in which he moves forward a knight instead of a pawn signifies the great feat that will secure his niggardly corner of immortality in the recesses of some chess book…without going insane” (102). While the narrator seemingly glamorizes obsession as an approach “to the infinite,” when obsession is applied to chess his attitude becomes more sardonic, implying the victory of chess obsession results only in a “niggardly corner of immortality.” Apparently obsession has variants, not all of which are exemplary.
Being on the same ship with one of these “enigmatic fools” (102), he becomes fixated on getting Czentovic’s attention by playing chess with McConnor, a Scottish mining engineer, who had made “a vast fortune drilling oil in California” (103). However, the man is an “egotistical high achiever who takes a defeat in even the most inconsequential game as an aspersion on his personal sense of self” (103). If he lost, he immediately demanded a rematch. After three days, Czentovic notices their game, but after a brief glance moves on. “Weighed and found wanting” (104) is the narrator’s guess, who tells McConnor that their observer is a chess master. Immediately, McConnor wants a match and quickly learns Czentovic only plays for money, specifically two hundred fifty dollars a game, not an inappropriate price for an expert in McConnor’s book. He had been deeply offended by the narrator’s calling their game that of “third-rate amateurs” (106) and is determined to disprove that aspersion.
When Czentovic appears for the match, he doesn’t introduce himself, implying, “You know who I am and who you are doesn’t interest me” (107). He suggests they play as a group against him; he’ll go to the opposite side of the room while they discuss their moves. Twenty-four moves later they are defeated, and what is worse “Czentovic let us feel how easily he was dispatching us” (107). Such “unashamed rudeness” (108) appalls the narrator, but the suddenly red-faced McConnor provocatively asks for a rematch, displaying “the uncontrolled passion that otherwise seizes people at the roulette table” when they have repeatedly lost their bets (108). McConnor, too, is capable of playing Czentovic endlessly until his fortune is exhausted, one of obsession’s routine dangers. The second match moves slowly but surely until it seems that McConnor might be able to capture a second queen, although it seems so easy that it might be a trap. He’s about to make the move in any case, when a strange forty-five-year-old man interjects and stops him, explaining the subsequent sequence of moves that will end with their defeat, calculating “a checkmate nine moves in advance” (110). Clearly a high-level expert or even champion, the new man advises them to “escape, evade instead!” and shows them how to play the game to a draw, seeming almost to be “reading the moves from a printed book” (110). As they follow his instructions, Czentovic looks at them carefully, and “our excitement expanded boundlessly…We had forced him to put himself on the same level as us, at least spatially” (111). The man explains Czentovic’s moves and changes tactics as needed to hold him to a draw. The crowd is both elated and “shocked by this improbable event” (112).
Without looking at McConnor, Czentovic took “a sharp glance directly at our rescuer” (112), recognizing his real opponent. The stranger demurs, explaining he hasn’t played in twenty-five years and apologizing for breaking into their game. McConnor can’t believe this, but Czentovic casually remarks that he’ll be available tomorrow at three because “the gentleman’s play certainly was interesting and quite unusual” (113). The crowd is delighted at the chance “to see such unswerving pride humiliated…We were fascinated, provoked, by the idea that the grandmaster’s laurels might be wrested from him on our very own ship” (114) causing instant fame. Plus they are fascinated by the “almost timorous modesty” (114) of the stranger, who is revealed to be an Austrian, so the narrator, his countryman, is selected to make the request. When he introduced himself, his famous family name is immediately recognized, and Dr. B. is baffled by the request--he had no idea he was playing against a grandmaster. But he demurs, wondering if he’s “capable of playing a game of chess by all the rules,” (115), a puzzling question that’s answered when the narrator hears the strange story about how he had learned to play chess.
After the start of World War II, his father’s small, legal practice had specialized in very discretely saving the assets of monasteries and the imperial family from the Nazis. Nonetheless, a spy had entered their employ, a talentless clerk hired because of a priest’s recommendation, so they would appear a normal business. However, when the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg resigned and the Nazis marched into Vienna, Dr. B. was immediately arrested by the SS; fortunately he had quickly dispatched all important documents in a laundry basket to a safer location. Dr. B. wasn’t sent to a concentration camp, but like other important individuals, such as Schuschnigg and Baron Rothschild, he was imprisoned in a single room in the Hotel Metropole, which was also Gestapo headquarters. The idea was “to extort either money or important information” (119) by keeping each of them in “the strictest conceivable isolation…in total nothingness…without any possessions…all my senses starved of nourishment…left irrecoverably alone with your body and four or five mute objects (120)…In a complete timeless and spaceless void” his “thoughts began to rotate and revolve around themselves; they, too, cannot endure a nothing” (121). After two weeks interrogations began, which were structured so as to be the most intimidating and confusing, making the victim wonder how much the Gestapo knew, and when he returned to his room ceaselessly forced to review his answers for slip-ups. Soon he had lost the ability to organize, concentrate, calculate, and plan; he tried “mental arithmetic” (123) but couldn’t concentrate, always wondering what they knew and what had he said or must say.
Four months reduced him to a muddled individual who feared he was going mad, but when he was taken to a new interrogation room he found the simple differences in the waiting room exciting, even observing water-drops on officers’ hung-up overcoats and a bulge in someone’s pocket that looked like a book. He carefully moved toward the coat, slipped the book into his trousers, and in his room briefly fantasized about its contents, only to discover in dismay that it was “a collection of 150 chess matches between grandmasters” (128). But how could he play without a partner? Or a board and pieces? There wasn’t even any writing; just diagrams and “initially incomprehensible notations” (129). At first he made chess pieces from bread and used his checkered bedspread, but quickly he “projected the chessboard and its pieces into my interior and could see the current position in the formulae just as a practised musician can hear all the orchestra’s voices and harmonies merely by looking at the score” (130). Soon he could “play any match in the book from memory--or to use the technical term: blind” (130). Now he had an activity to keep his mind active and focused “that nullified the nothing around me” (130). His chess activity honed his brain’s “agility and vigour,” and he began to enjoy the game, to “understand its finesse, its tricks and stings in attack and defence…the technique of forethought, of calculation, of riposte” (130). The grandmasters he studied became his “beloved comrades” (130).
These chess techniques were also applicable during interrogations “to defend against false threats and concealed manoeuvres” (131), making the Gestapo regard him with a certain respect because he didn’t go to pieces as most others did. However, to keep his mind active, he now had to invent new games and to compete against himself, which is “a logical absurdity” (131). He had to divide his brain so that one part didn’t know what the other was doing and plot several moves in advance for each part, “a total division of consciousness…wanting to play chess against yourself is as much of a paradox as jumping over your own shadow” (132). The “limitless strains” of this activity…the splitting of my self…and devising matches made me lose the ground beneath my feet” (133). Previously, play had been simple memory work; he was simply a spectator of the game, but “to play against myself, it was myself I began unknowingly to challenge” (134). Each part was filled with “ambition, an impatience, to win and to conquer…that crowed triumphantly when the other made a mistake, and yet cursed itself for its own clumsiness” (134). An artificial schizophrenia occurred that combined with his rage at his confinement and morphed into a “lust for vengeance” (134). He becomes manic as the two parts of himself battled for victory, “it was an obsession against which I had no defence” (135). Even asleep he played and his interrogations became so confused the questioners began to wonder; he lost desire to eat and only drank water feverishly, paced up and down his cell faster and faster; “the craving to win, to subjugate, to defeat myself, was transformed into a kind of rage…a pathological type of mental over-exertion…chess poisoning” (136). He had vague memories of “my own voice, hoarse and malignant, shouting ‘check’ or ‘mate’ at itself” (136).
Then one morning he awoke resting in a bed and thought he was dreaming. When he finally looked, he saw a nurse, who spoke to him softly, which he could hardly believe. A doctor arrived, who recognized his family name, and reported he’d been crying out curious formulae, which they didn’t understand. Later the doctor revealed they had thought he was fighting someone in his room, and when the warder entered he was attacked, so Dr. B had been sent for mental examination. The doctor promised not to reveal that he was now improved and managed to get him exiled from his homeland. Afterwards, as a safety measure, his mind blocked out what had happened, and only on this ship had he finally remembered. When he saw chess pieces moving on a board, the experience was like that of an astronomer, who finally saw a planet whose presence he had calculated (140). As a complete opposite to Czentovic, Dr. B. had experienced chess completely as a mental abstraction, not needing any physical reality for his play. Somewhat reluctantly he agrees to one match simply to see if he can really play chess, or “whether everything in the cell…had already crossed into madness” (141). He just wanted to settle up and not start something, which his doctor had warned about: “Anyone who has once lapsed into a mania is always in danger” (142). Avoiding a chessboard was advisable.
Nonetheless, he shows up at the time scheduled, and the players’ moves are too sophisticated for the crowd of onlookers to either understand or remember. Czentovic is his normal, stolid self, staring at the board, while Dr. B. seems “easy and unselfconscious…a real dilettante…relaxed” (142), always seeming to have anticipated Czentovic’s moves. The champion’s slowness in making his moves increases as the game proceeds, and the audience is unable to decide who has the advantage or even the strategy of the players. A “stultifying fatigue” (143) sets in for the audience, and Dr. B., whose mind works much faster than his opponent’s becomes impatient, “almost hostile” (144). Dr. B. makes a move and “triumphantly declared, ‘So, finished!’” (144). Czentovic doesn’t respond and Dr. B. starts to pace as he had in his cell, “the red light of madness in his fixed yet fevered gaze. But he still seemed to be thinking clearly” (145). Czentovic finally pushes the pieces from the board and capitulates, so as not to be checkmated. He immediately offers another game. Feverishly Dr. B. agrees and they set up the pieces, while the narrator reminds him of his pledge to play only one game. He scornfully says he could have played twenty games in the time it took for this one, and he hopes not to be put to sleep. “Something new happens between the two players, a dangerous tension, an ardent hate…two enemies sworn to the other’s destruction;” moreover, Czentovic “had realized he could use his slowness to tire and irritate his opponent” (146). Rather than speed up, Czentovic reminds Dr. B. they’ve agreed on ten minutes for a move.
Thus it went, as slowly as possible, and Dr. B. seems as if he “had diverted his thoughts onto something quite else” (148). He mumbles to himself, and the narrator guesses that he’s playing other matches mentally. Immediately after Czentovic’s move, “Dr. B, without even really looking at the board” makes a move and declares the king’s in check” (148). Czentovic slowly savors the moment and “with exaggerated politeness” says he doesn’t see a check (148). Even the onlookers can see that Dr. B.’s move is incorrect. Then he exclaims that Czentovic has made illegal moves and everything is wrong on the board, until the narrator reminds him what his doctor had said. Then he concedes the match, apologizes to all and leaves saying “it was the last time I try my hand at chess” (149). After he’s gone, Czentovic compliments his game, “The attack wasn’t at all badly set up. For a dilettante, that gentleman is actually extraordinarily gifted” (150). Because the reader knows how Dr. B. acquired his skill, Czentovic’s compliment becomes completely ironic rather than a simple compliment.
Zweig’s novella contrasts two types of minds, one slow, methodical without any understanding of the world outside of chess, a type of madness that fits within acceptable social norms. However, Dr. B’s mind is complex, involved with the world, and eager for challenges, which leads him to push himself into a destructive self-challenge that results in madness and requires external restraint. For the first mind, careful control over his limited environment provides both success and financial security, while for the second his chess obsession threatens his mental functioning. Two types of minds, both with the same obsession, both to some degree mad, and neither able to live successfully in the world.
On board a ship en route to Buenos Aires during World War II, the narrator discovers that the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, is also a passenger. His friend fills him in on Czentovic’s meteoric rise from an obscure peasant amateur to defeating the most talented, experienced players in the world. Which was all the more amazing because the young man had limited intellectual capacities: he couldn’t write a sentence or play chess from memory, playing “blind,” but must have a board to make his moves. In addition, “his play was dogged, slow, unshakeable” (95), never lifting his head from the board.
The boy’s talent had been unexpectedly discovered in a rural village on the Danube, where he had simply watched two amateurs play and then been able to take a seat and win games. This excited the local Graf, a chess fanatic, who agreed to subsidize his training in Vienna; “after six months, Mirko had mastered various secrets of chess technique” (97), and finally, at twenty, he became world champion. His singular accomplishment flew in the face of previous champions, whose ranks included an “illustrious pantheon of masters who united the most varied types of intellectual pre-eminence--philosophers, mathematicians, perceptive, ingenious or often creative minds,” while Czentovic was “a total stranger to the life of the mind” (98). In addition, his behavior remained crude and became marked by vulgar greed as his limited experience exposed him only to winning at chess and earning money by winning. He had no idea of other accomplishments that gained fame, no exposure to Rembrandt, Dante, or even Napoleon.
As it turns out, the narrator is fascinated by obsession, thinking that “the more a person restricts himself, the closer, conversely, he approaches to the infinite”…They are people who “build their particular obsessions into the most extraordinary and unique abbreviations of the world outside” (100). While a chess player’s obsession with his game might be excused as necessary for success, the fact that obsession itself poses possible dangers is not considered. This reality is overlooked by those enamored of the “royal game,” with its play devoid of chance, awarding “its laurels only to the intellect, or, rather, to a particular form of intellectual ability” (101). In fact, it may include aspects of science and art, providing “a unique synthesis of all opposites…its mechanical structure animated by the imagination…always developing yet ever sterile, a logic with no results…the only game that belongs in every era and among every people…Where is its beginning and where its end?” (101). The game has developed a specific type of genius, perhaps resulting from unique mental abilities, for it’s hard to imagine anyone with a normal mentality willing to reduce his life “to the cramped monotony of black and white…to whom a new opening in which he moves forward a knight instead of a pawn signifies the great feat that will secure his niggardly corner of immortality in the recesses of some chess book…without going insane” (102). While the narrator seemingly glamorizes obsession as an approach “to the infinite,” when obsession is applied to chess his attitude becomes more sardonic, implying the victory of chess obsession results only in a “niggardly corner of immortality.” Apparently obsession has variants, not all of which are exemplary.
Being on the same ship with one of these “enigmatic fools” (102), he becomes fixated on getting Czentovic’s attention by playing chess with McConnor, a Scottish mining engineer, who had made “a vast fortune drilling oil in California” (103). However, the man is an “egotistical high achiever who takes a defeat in even the most inconsequential game as an aspersion on his personal sense of self” (103). If he lost, he immediately demanded a rematch. After three days, Czentovic notices their game, but after a brief glance moves on. “Weighed and found wanting” (104) is the narrator’s guess, who tells McConnor that their observer is a chess master. Immediately, McConnor wants a match and quickly learns Czentovic only plays for money, specifically two hundred fifty dollars a game, not an inappropriate price for an expert in McConnor’s book. He had been deeply offended by the narrator’s calling their game that of “third-rate amateurs” (106) and is determined to disprove that aspersion.
When Czentovic appears for the match, he doesn’t introduce himself, implying, “You know who I am and who you are doesn’t interest me” (107). He suggests they play as a group against him; he’ll go to the opposite side of the room while they discuss their moves. Twenty-four moves later they are defeated, and what is worse “Czentovic let us feel how easily he was dispatching us” (107). Such “unashamed rudeness” (108) appalls the narrator, but the suddenly red-faced McConnor provocatively asks for a rematch, displaying “the uncontrolled passion that otherwise seizes people at the roulette table” when they have repeatedly lost their bets (108). McConnor, too, is capable of playing Czentovic endlessly until his fortune is exhausted, one of obsession’s routine dangers. The second match moves slowly but surely until it seems that McConnor might be able to capture a second queen, although it seems so easy that it might be a trap. He’s about to make the move in any case, when a strange forty-five-year-old man interjects and stops him, explaining the subsequent sequence of moves that will end with their defeat, calculating “a checkmate nine moves in advance” (110). Clearly a high-level expert or even champion, the new man advises them to “escape, evade instead!” and shows them how to play the game to a draw, seeming almost to be “reading the moves from a printed book” (110). As they follow his instructions, Czentovic looks at them carefully, and “our excitement expanded boundlessly…We had forced him to put himself on the same level as us, at least spatially” (111). The man explains Czentovic’s moves and changes tactics as needed to hold him to a draw. The crowd is both elated and “shocked by this improbable event” (112).
Without looking at McConnor, Czentovic took “a sharp glance directly at our rescuer” (112), recognizing his real opponent. The stranger demurs, explaining he hasn’t played in twenty-five years and apologizing for breaking into their game. McConnor can’t believe this, but Czentovic casually remarks that he’ll be available tomorrow at three because “the gentleman’s play certainly was interesting and quite unusual” (113). The crowd is delighted at the chance “to see such unswerving pride humiliated…We were fascinated, provoked, by the idea that the grandmaster’s laurels might be wrested from him on our very own ship” (114) causing instant fame. Plus they are fascinated by the “almost timorous modesty” (114) of the stranger, who is revealed to be an Austrian, so the narrator, his countryman, is selected to make the request. When he introduced himself, his famous family name is immediately recognized, and Dr. B. is baffled by the request--he had no idea he was playing against a grandmaster. But he demurs, wondering if he’s “capable of playing a game of chess by all the rules,” (115), a puzzling question that’s answered when the narrator hears the strange story about how he had learned to play chess.
After the start of World War II, his father’s small, legal practice had specialized in very discretely saving the assets of monasteries and the imperial family from the Nazis. Nonetheless, a spy had entered their employ, a talentless clerk hired because of a priest’s recommendation, so they would appear a normal business. However, when the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg resigned and the Nazis marched into Vienna, Dr. B. was immediately arrested by the SS; fortunately he had quickly dispatched all important documents in a laundry basket to a safer location. Dr. B. wasn’t sent to a concentration camp, but like other important individuals, such as Schuschnigg and Baron Rothschild, he was imprisoned in a single room in the Hotel Metropole, which was also Gestapo headquarters. The idea was “to extort either money or important information” (119) by keeping each of them in “the strictest conceivable isolation…in total nothingness…without any possessions…all my senses starved of nourishment…left irrecoverably alone with your body and four or five mute objects (120)…In a complete timeless and spaceless void” his “thoughts began to rotate and revolve around themselves; they, too, cannot endure a nothing” (121). After two weeks interrogations began, which were structured so as to be the most intimidating and confusing, making the victim wonder how much the Gestapo knew, and when he returned to his room ceaselessly forced to review his answers for slip-ups. Soon he had lost the ability to organize, concentrate, calculate, and plan; he tried “mental arithmetic” (123) but couldn’t concentrate, always wondering what they knew and what had he said or must say.
Four months reduced him to a muddled individual who feared he was going mad, but when he was taken to a new interrogation room he found the simple differences in the waiting room exciting, even observing water-drops on officers’ hung-up overcoats and a bulge in someone’s pocket that looked like a book. He carefully moved toward the coat, slipped the book into his trousers, and in his room briefly fantasized about its contents, only to discover in dismay that it was “a collection of 150 chess matches between grandmasters” (128). But how could he play without a partner? Or a board and pieces? There wasn’t even any writing; just diagrams and “initially incomprehensible notations” (129). At first he made chess pieces from bread and used his checkered bedspread, but quickly he “projected the chessboard and its pieces into my interior and could see the current position in the formulae just as a practised musician can hear all the orchestra’s voices and harmonies merely by looking at the score” (130). Soon he could “play any match in the book from memory--or to use the technical term: blind” (130). Now he had an activity to keep his mind active and focused “that nullified the nothing around me” (130). His chess activity honed his brain’s “agility and vigour,” and he began to enjoy the game, to “understand its finesse, its tricks and stings in attack and defence…the technique of forethought, of calculation, of riposte” (130). The grandmasters he studied became his “beloved comrades” (130).
These chess techniques were also applicable during interrogations “to defend against false threats and concealed manoeuvres” (131), making the Gestapo regard him with a certain respect because he didn’t go to pieces as most others did. However, to keep his mind active, he now had to invent new games and to compete against himself, which is “a logical absurdity” (131). He had to divide his brain so that one part didn’t know what the other was doing and plot several moves in advance for each part, “a total division of consciousness…wanting to play chess against yourself is as much of a paradox as jumping over your own shadow” (132). The “limitless strains” of this activity…the splitting of my self…and devising matches made me lose the ground beneath my feet” (133). Previously, play had been simple memory work; he was simply a spectator of the game, but “to play against myself, it was myself I began unknowingly to challenge” (134). Each part was filled with “ambition, an impatience, to win and to conquer…that crowed triumphantly when the other made a mistake, and yet cursed itself for its own clumsiness” (134). An artificial schizophrenia occurred that combined with his rage at his confinement and morphed into a “lust for vengeance” (134). He becomes manic as the two parts of himself battled for victory, “it was an obsession against which I had no defence” (135). Even asleep he played and his interrogations became so confused the questioners began to wonder; he lost desire to eat and only drank water feverishly, paced up and down his cell faster and faster; “the craving to win, to subjugate, to defeat myself, was transformed into a kind of rage…a pathological type of mental over-exertion…chess poisoning” (136). He had vague memories of “my own voice, hoarse and malignant, shouting ‘check’ or ‘mate’ at itself” (136).
Then one morning he awoke resting in a bed and thought he was dreaming. When he finally looked, he saw a nurse, who spoke to him softly, which he could hardly believe. A doctor arrived, who recognized his family name, and reported he’d been crying out curious formulae, which they didn’t understand. Later the doctor revealed they had thought he was fighting someone in his room, and when the warder entered he was attacked, so Dr. B had been sent for mental examination. The doctor promised not to reveal that he was now improved and managed to get him exiled from his homeland. Afterwards, as a safety measure, his mind blocked out what had happened, and only on this ship had he finally remembered. When he saw chess pieces moving on a board, the experience was like that of an astronomer, who finally saw a planet whose presence he had calculated (140). As a complete opposite to Czentovic, Dr. B. had experienced chess completely as a mental abstraction, not needing any physical reality for his play. Somewhat reluctantly he agrees to one match simply to see if he can really play chess, or “whether everything in the cell…had already crossed into madness” (141). He just wanted to settle up and not start something, which his doctor had warned about: “Anyone who has once lapsed into a mania is always in danger” (142). Avoiding a chessboard was advisable.
Nonetheless, he shows up at the time scheduled, and the players’ moves are too sophisticated for the crowd of onlookers to either understand or remember. Czentovic is his normal, stolid self, staring at the board, while Dr. B. seems “easy and unselfconscious…a real dilettante…relaxed” (142), always seeming to have anticipated Czentovic’s moves. The champion’s slowness in making his moves increases as the game proceeds, and the audience is unable to decide who has the advantage or even the strategy of the players. A “stultifying fatigue” (143) sets in for the audience, and Dr. B., whose mind works much faster than his opponent’s becomes impatient, “almost hostile” (144). Dr. B. makes a move and “triumphantly declared, ‘So, finished!’” (144). Czentovic doesn’t respond and Dr. B. starts to pace as he had in his cell, “the red light of madness in his fixed yet fevered gaze. But he still seemed to be thinking clearly” (145). Czentovic finally pushes the pieces from the board and capitulates, so as not to be checkmated. He immediately offers another game. Feverishly Dr. B. agrees and they set up the pieces, while the narrator reminds him of his pledge to play only one game. He scornfully says he could have played twenty games in the time it took for this one, and he hopes not to be put to sleep. “Something new happens between the two players, a dangerous tension, an ardent hate…two enemies sworn to the other’s destruction;” moreover, Czentovic “had realized he could use his slowness to tire and irritate his opponent” (146). Rather than speed up, Czentovic reminds Dr. B. they’ve agreed on ten minutes for a move.
Thus it went, as slowly as possible, and Dr. B. seems as if he “had diverted his thoughts onto something quite else” (148). He mumbles to himself, and the narrator guesses that he’s playing other matches mentally. Immediately after Czentovic’s move, “Dr. B, without even really looking at the board” makes a move and declares the king’s in check” (148). Czentovic slowly savors the moment and “with exaggerated politeness” says he doesn’t see a check (148). Even the onlookers can see that Dr. B.’s move is incorrect. Then he exclaims that Czentovic has made illegal moves and everything is wrong on the board, until the narrator reminds him what his doctor had said. Then he concedes the match, apologizes to all and leaves saying “it was the last time I try my hand at chess” (149). After he’s gone, Czentovic compliments his game, “The attack wasn’t at all badly set up. For a dilettante, that gentleman is actually extraordinarily gifted” (150). Because the reader knows how Dr. B. acquired his skill, Czentovic’s compliment becomes completely ironic rather than a simple compliment.
Zweig’s novella contrasts two types of minds, one slow, methodical without any understanding of the world outside of chess, a type of madness that fits within acceptable social norms. However, Dr. B’s mind is complex, involved with the world, and eager for challenges, which leads him to push himself into a destructive self-challenge that results in madness and requires external restraint. For the first mind, careful control over his limited environment provides both success and financial security, while for the second his chess obsession threatens his mental functioning. Two types of minds, both with the same obsession, both to some degree mad, and neither able to live successfully in the world.
June 24, 2025
schachnovelle: 5/5
confusion: 4.5/5
fear: 5/5
journey into the past: 3/5
a burning secret: 2/5
fear es una nueva historia corta favorita fr🙏🏼 zweig el maestro
confusion: 4.5/5
fear: 5/5
journey into the past: 3/5
a burning secret: 2/5
fear es una nueva historia corta favorita fr🙏🏼 zweig el maestro
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews