Chess player

Book: The Chess Player Author: Stefan Zweig Five weeks before his suicide, Stefan Zweig wrote to his friend Hermann Kesten, a letter in which he talked about his latest novel "Royal Game / Chess Story," which was translated as "The Chess Player." He said: "There is nothing important I can say about myself. I wrote a short story according to my favorite miserable model, and it is longer than can be published in a newspaper or magazine, shorter than to be included in a book, more mysterious than that the broad readership can understand, and stranger than its subject matter itself." But the suicidal novelist was mistaken in his assumptions; his novel, which did not reach eighty pages, was classified under what is called war literature. And because his novel carried its continuation within it, not only because of its simplicity or the clear symbolism it carried, linking battles of pawns, castles, and wooden knights to the real wars that have shaken the world for a century with their burning bombs and destructive missiles, but also because of the symbolism it contained, of profound depth, the reader slips over its meaning, descending into the most private and strange feelings of human nature. The Chess Story is still considered one of the most mature novels in European literature, which placed the modern human directly and without hesitation or arrogant mockery in front of his reality, making him face himself alone in a dark room. Then it pulled him from the hell of loneliness into the harshness of modern human reason, to depict the harshest psychological and existential confrontations in our contemporary world: a confrontation between life and reason, between existence and logic, and a sharp clash between feeling and the human mind.