Chess and Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman: Stefan Zweig

By Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig was born on November 28, 1881, in Vienna and is one of the most important European authors of the first half of the 20th century. Jewish, he was persecuted by the Nazis and forced into exile. His final residence was in Brazil, where he met a tragic end. A versatile writer, Zweig dedicated himself to almost all literary activities but became famous mainly for his novellas, many of which were translated into various languages ​​and adapted for the theater and cinema. In total, 56 of his works were brought to the screen, which helped to expand his notoriety. In this work, the reader will get to know the immense talent and creativity of Stefan Zweig through two of his most famous novellas: "Chess" and "24 Hours in the Life of a Woman."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lebooks Editora
• Release date: May 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9786558942641

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), novelist, biographer, translator, and poet, was born in Austria and became one of the bestselling European authors of the 1920s and 30s. He is renowned for his psychologically astute fiction as well as enthralling studies of seminal figures such as Montaigne, Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Freud. His work has inspired stage and screen adaptations, including the films Letters from an Unknown Woman and The Grand Hotel Budapest by Wes Anderson. Exiled from Europe by the Nazis, he committed suicide in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942.

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Stefan Zweig

CHESS STORY and TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN

Originals Titles:

VIERUNDZWANZIG STUNDEN AUS DEM LEBEN EINER FRAU

And

SCHANHNOVELLE

First Edition

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHESS STORY

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN

INTRODUCTION

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Stefan Zweig

1881-1942

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1881, the son of Moritz Zweig and Ida Brettauer.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, he showed talent for literature from an early age, publishing his first book, a collection of poems, at the age of 20. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he presented his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Hippolyte Tayne in 1904. That same year, he published his first biography, that of the French writer Paul Verlaine. In 1906, he wrote his first play.

During World War I (1914-1918), while living with his first wife, Frederike Maria, Zweig volunteered for the Yellow and Black Cross, a philanthropic organization of the Vienna municipality. He was then called to serve in the Austrian army's War Archives, where, along with other writers like Rainer Maria Rilke, he produced newspapers for the soldiers. During the conflict, he wrote the pacifist text Jeremiah, which was highly successful.

In late 1917, he traveled to Switzerland, where he remained until the end of the war. Upon returning to Austria, he settled in Salzburg in 1919. He would live in the city until 1934, during which time he wrote his most well-known works. In the 1920s, his books began to be adapted into films. Over 75 years, 56 of Zweig's works were brought to the screen.

Pressured by the Nazis due to his Jewish origin, he abandoned Austria in 1935 and emigrated to England, where he resided until 1941. During this period, in August 1936, he made his first trip to Brazil, where he was received as a celebrity. In 1938, with the Anschluss - the annexation of Austria by Germany - Zweig, like other Jews in the country, lost Austrian nationality; as a stateless person, he began to seek British citizenship. In mid-1938, while awaiting a response from the British authorities, he applied for citizenship to the Brazilian government.

After the start of World War II (September 1939), he decided to leave England and, accompanied by his second wife, Charlotte Elizabeth Zweig, traveled to the United States in June 1940 and from there to Brazil.

Exile in Brazil and suicide

Zweig and Lotte made three trips to Brazil. During the first, between 1940 and 1941, for a series of lectures throughout the country, he wrote from Bahia to Manfred and Hannah Altmann, his in-laws: You cannot imagine what it means to see this country that is so interesting and has not yet been spoiled by tourists.

It was during this first trip that Zweig, with Lotte's help, gathered his personal notes and finished the essay Brazil, Land of the Future. The nickname Land of the Future, coined by Zweig, would become a moniker for Brazil. Indeed, despite the depression he already felt due to the unfolding war in Europe, the writer tried to find in Brazil not only the conditions to recreate his private life but also the old atmosphere of his native continent.

According to Alberto Dines, author of a biography of the writer, Zweig would be one of the last remnants of European culture and way of life from the 19th century. His discouragement with the advance of Nazism, in fact, came long before, since World War I, when the first signs of a rupture with the old European imperial order emerged.

Zweig was enthusiastically received by both the local intellectual community and the political authorities. For Brazilian intellectuals, the presence of such a renowned writer on national soil brought prestige and opportunities for exchange with other foreign writers. But for political authorities, Zweig's arrival, with his liberal and anti-Nazi baggage, was contradictory. Getúlio Vargas's government remained in power thanks to authoritarian policies, and many of its ministers and military advisors sympathized with Nazism, although others, more liberal, approached Zweig.

From the third trip to Brazil, Lotte and Zweig settled in Petrópolis, a city in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, where he completed his autobiography, The World of Yesterday; wrote the novella Chess Story: A Chess Tale, and began the work The World of Yesterday, an autobiographical work with a description of Europe before 1914.

In 1942, depressed by the growth of intolerance and authoritarianism in Europe and without hope for the future of humanity, Zweig wrote a farewell letter and, together with his wife, Lotte, committed suicide with a fatal dose of barbiturates. The sad event occurred on February 23 in the city of Petrópolis, where they had rented a house. The news shocked both Brazilians and admirers worldwide. The couple was buried in the Municipal Cemetery of Petrópolis, according to Jewish funeral traditions, in the perpetual 47,417, block 11. The house where the couple committed suicide is now a cultural center dedicated to the life and work of Stefan Zweig.

About the works

Zweig was one of the most famous writers in the world during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the USA, South America, and Europe. Versatile, he produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalistic pieces, but he stood out and became famous mainly for his novellas, many of which were translated into several languages and adapted for the cinema screens dozens of times.

Among his most famous novellas are: Amok, Chess, 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, Fear, Confusion of Feelings, and Beware of Pity.

"Chess, a novella (originally Schachnovelle"), was written in Petrópolis, the writer's final destination. The novella has chess as its backdrop, a game to which Zweig had a great affinity; in fact, like the main character, he had the habit of carefully studying the games of the great masters. Clearly, as in his other narratives, the game of chess is extremely symbolic, and Zweig also addresses through the character a dark period in world history.

The novella "24 Hours in the Life of a Woman" was classified by Freud as a masterpiece. Indeed, this is one of Stefan Zweig's most disturbing stories - a skillful play of mirrors that celebrates disorder and addresses with naturalness and without taboos feminine impulses. The 24 hours that the title announces is a story told by an English noblewoman who, after a scandal at a hotel on the Riviera, gives in to the desire and necessity to set aside her own discretion to tell the narrator, himself a guest of the hotel, about the much more unpredictable and unsettling event that revolutionized her life about 30 years earlier.

CHESS STORY

The usual last-minute bustle of activity reigned on board the large passenger steamer that was to leave New York for Buenos Aires at midnight. Visitors who had come up from the country to see their friends off were pushing and shoving, telegraph boys with caps tilted sideways on their heads ran through the saloons calling out names, luggage and flowers were being brought aboard, inquisitive children ran up and down the steps, while the band for the deck show played imperturbably on. I was standing on the promenade deck a little way from all this turmoil, talking to an acquaintance, when two or three bright flashlights went off close to us. It seemed that some prominent person was being quickly interviewed by reporters and photographed just before the ship left. My friend glanced that way and smiled. ‘Ah, you have a rare bird on board there. That’s Czentovic.’ And as this information obviously left me looking rather blank, he explained further. ‘Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s been doing the rounds of America from the east coast to the west, playing in tournaments, and now he’s off to fresh triumphs in Argentina.’

I did in fact remember the name of the young world champion, and even some of the details of his meteoric career. My friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to add a whole series of anecdotes. About a year ago, Czentovic had suddenly risen to be ranked with the most experienced masters of the art of chess, men like Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker and Bogolyubov. Not since the appearance of the seven-year-old infant prodigy Rzeschewski at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the incursion into that famous guild of a complete unknown aroused such general notice. For Czentovic’s intellectual qualities by no means seemed to have marked him out for such a dazzling career. Soon the secret was leaking out that, in private life, this grandmaster of chess couldn’t write a sentence in any language without making spelling mistakes, and as one of his piqued colleagues remarked with irate derision, ‘his ignorance was universal in all fields’. The son of a poor South Slavonian boatman, whose tiny craft had been run down one night by a freight steamer carrying grain, the boy, then twelve, had been taken in after his father’s death by the priest of his remote village out of charity, and by providing extra tuition at home the good Father did his very best to compensate for what the taciturn, stolid, broad-browed child had failed to learn at the village school.

But his efforts were in vain. Even after the written characters had been explained to him a hundred times, Mirko kept staring at them as if they were unfamiliar, and his ponderously operating brain could not grasp the simplest educational subjects. Even at the age of fourteen he still had to use his fingers to do sums, and it was an enormous effort for the adolescent boy to read a book or a newspaper. Yet Mirko could not be called reluctant or recalcitrant. He obediently did as he was told, fetched water, split firewood, worked in the fields, cleared out the kitchen, and dependably, if at an irritatingly slow pace, performed any service asked of him. But what particularly upset the good priest about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless he was especially requested to do it, he never asked a question, didn’t play with other lads, and didn’t seek occupation of his own accord without being expressly told to. As soon as Mirko had done his chores around the house, he sat stolidly in the living-room with that vacant gaze seen in sheep out at pasture, paying not the least attention to what was going on around him. While the priest, smoking his long country pipe, played his usual three games of chess in the evening with the local policeman, the fair-haired boy would sit beside them in silence, staring from under his heavy eyelids at the checkered board with apparently sleepy indifference.

One winter evening, while the two players were absorbed in their daily game, the sound of little sleigh bells approaching fast and then even faster was heard out in the village street. A farmer, his cap dusted with snow, tramped hastily in: his old mother was on her deathbed, could the priest come quickly to give her Extreme Unction before she died? Without a moment’s hesitation the priest followed him out. The policeman, who hadn’t yet finished his glass of beer, lit another pipe to round off the evening, and was just about to pull his heavy boots on when he noticed Mirko’s eyes fixed unwaveringly on the chessboard and the game they had begun.

‘Well, would you like to finish it?’ he joked, sure that the sleepy boy had no idea how to move a single chessman on the board correctly. The lad looked up timidly, then nodded and sat down in the priest’s chair. After fourteen moves the policeman was beaten, and what was more, he had to admit that his defeat couldn’t be blamed on any inadvertently careless move of his own. The second game produced the same result.

‘Balaam’s ass!’ cried the priest in astonishment on his return, and explained to the policeman, whose knowledge of the Bible was less extensive than his own, that a similar miracle had occurred two thousand years ago, when a dumb creature suddenly spoke with the voice of wisdom. Despite the late hour, the priest could not refrain from challenging his semiliterate pupil to a duel. Mirko easily defeated him too. He played slowly, imperturbably, doggedly, never once raising his lowered head with its broad brow to look up from the board. But he played with undeniable confidence; over the next few days neither the policeman nor the priest managed to win a game against him.

The priest, who was in a better position than anyone else to assess his pupil’s backwardness in other respects, was genuinely curious to see how far this strange, one-sided talent would stand up to a harder test. Having taken Mirko to the village barber to get his shaggy, straw-blond hair cut and make him reasonably presentable, he drove him in his sleigh to the small town nearby, where he knew that the cafe in the main square was frequented by a club of chess enthusiasts with whom, experience told him, he couldn’t compete. These regulars were not a little surprised when the priest propelled the red-cheeked, fair-haired fifteen-year-old, in his sheepskin coat turned inside out and his high, heavy boot s, into the coffee-house, where the boy