Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian Jewish writer who in the 1920s and 1930s was among the most translated authors in the world, known for psychologically intense novellas, biographies such as Marie Antoinette, and his memoir The World of Yesterday. A committed European humanist, he left Austria in 1934, became a British subject, and in 1941 settled in Petrópolis, Brazil. Despairing at the war and the destruction of his Europe, he and his wife Lotte took their own lives there in February 1942.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
