The Rise and Fall of Genius: Part I
On Stefan Zweig's "Chess" and the formation of greatness.
There’s a story in the Bible about a prophet sent by a king to curse the Israelites. It’s one of those stories that the tragically literal scoff at and the myopically modern scratch their heads at, but if you know how to approach myth you can get a lot out of it. Here goes:
On his way to curse the Israelites, the prophet Balaam is stopped by an angel, but only the donkey he’s riding recognises who’s before them. Three times the angel appears, three times the donkey refuses to move, and three times Balaam beats the animal in anger. Finally, the donkey turns to him and says, “Why are you whipping me? Have I not always served you well?” The implication is that there’s a good reason for his refusal to walk. With that, God opens the cruel prophet’s eyes so that he sees the angel before them.
This tale, little more than a paragraph, is like one of those superfoods the maniacally healthy are always telling us about: it packs a lot of goodness into a tiny mouthful. In metaphoric terms, it’s nutritionally dense. One of the many things this tale tells us is that even something simple and plainspoken can guide us toward truth. Stefan Zweig’s masterful short story Chess1 is one of these apparently simple things — a fable-like story told in sturdy, unadorned prose — that packs a whole lot into its mere eighty pages and gestures at truths much more complex than its method of delivery.
Chess is a container for various stories told to a narrator who tells them to us. It’s hard not to picture this narrator as Zweig himself, an amateur error in reading of course, but all we know of him is that he’s a writer fascinated with “any kind of monomaniac obsessed by a single idea” — Zweig was also a biographer of genius — that he’s Austrian — Zweig was Jewish-Austrian — and that he’s on a passenger ship bound for Buenos Aires from New York; no prize for guessing which writer lived briefly in New York before moving to Brazil.
Through this anonymous authorial voice, we learn the history of world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, who’s onboard the same ship. He was a young boy when his father was drowned at sea.2 Taken in by a priest who did his best to nurture the boy, Czentovic’s only aptitude seemed to be for mediocrity. He managed to grow up without learning to read or write, and he spent most of his time in the priest’s house sitting in stolid silence “with that vacant gaze seen in sheep out at pasture”. But he put that empty stare and his unburdened mind to use every evening when the priest played chess with the local policeman. The boy watched and, by some process no doubt entirely unknowable even to himself, he learned the game. When he was finally invited to play, he beat the policeman in fourteen moves.
The punchline to this sequence of ironies is that Czentovic became the world chess champion at a young age. He also became greedy, arrogant, and entirely divorced from the world outside of the chess games he plays and for which he demands prompt payment. Czentovic represents a caution to all those who revere greatness. Extreme proficiency in one area of life, even mastery of a rarefied talent enough to earn the plaudit of “genius”, isn’t everything. The greatest chess player can also be the worst kind of cynic, whom Oscar Wilde described as someone who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”.
In fact, it might be easier to consider yourself great when you’ve removed all standards by which you could be found lacking. Zweig writes (as if he had in mind the zinger from Wilde) that because Czentovic “has no idea that there are values in this world other than chess and money, he has every reason to feel pleased with himself”. Then there’s this great line:
“And isn’t it appallingly easy to think yourself a great man when you’re not burdened by the faintest notion that men like Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”
So, yes, it’s entirely possible that greatness of the esoteric variety, which narrows itself into a specific domain, can come with deep failings in other areas of life. You can be wealthy, you can be gifted, you can excel further than any of your peers within a particular domain, and you can still be an uncultured, discourteous jerk. You can be undoubtedly smart yet intolerably ignorant. Just look at Elon Musk.
Annihilating the Void
After introducing Czentovic, our narrator follows his own monomaniacal obsession by stalking the chess master across the ship. Eventually, he manages to secure a game between the eminently unlikeable expert and a group of passengers acting as one collective player.3
As the game unfolds, with Czentovic barely attending to it yet trouncing his excitable opponents, a voice emerges from the crowd and begins whispering advice to the underdogs. When they do as he says, they begin to pull ahead, until finally, incredibly, the game comes to a draw. The identity of their advisor — and the remarkable story of how he, a man who hasn’t touched a chess board in twenty years, became so skilled at chess that he could beat the world master — becomes the mystery Zweig explores in the rest of the story.
Years earlier, our mystery man was forced into solitary confinement, held prisoner within the four walls of a tiny hotel room. The emptiness of this existence weighed on him until cracks began spiderwebbing across his psyche, because “nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void”. Like a play in a chess game where the pieces are lined up in advance of a check, the machinations of plot conspire here so that learning chess is the only thing he has to fill his empty days. This is his tenuous safety line anchoring him to sanity:
“For all at once I had an occupation — a pointless, aimless one if you like, but an occupation that annihilated the void around me.”
But what was that thing Nietzsche said about staring into a void and how it stares back into you? This, we come to see, is the terrible cost of the mastery that our man gains in chess. When he’s put up against Czentovic in a game of chess, he discovers that the madness chess once prevented is now brought on by the same game. The movement of his pieces across the board brings on something like a manic state in which he almost loses himself entirely.
Whatever greatness this man achieved in mastering chess to such a degree that he might be the greatest in the world, it was short-lived, a brilliant flash in the otherwise indistinct night sky most of us occupy most of the time. He rose, dazzled briefly, then fell to earth again. This is an image Zweig explored in more detail in The Struggle With the Daemon, his literary triptych examining the genius of Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. There, he described these productive, self-destructive figures as “shooting stars, which flash on indeterminable paths” and who:
“flashed like meteors athwart the night of their mission ... they hurtled towards the infinite in a parabola which seemed scarcely to touch our world of actualities.”4
Zweig goes on to tell us that the trajectory of greatness “is the parabola”:
“[A] steep, impetuous ascent, an uprush into limitless space, a brusque change of direction, followed by a no less steep, a no less impetuous decline ... [The] life of the daemonic terminates in an explosion or a conflagration.”
The terminus of our chess player’s meteoric trajectory is more of an implosion than an explosion, but it’s no less an end to his greatness. And if he hadn’t had the sense to abandon the game of chess, to turn away from glory to preserve his humble sanity, he might have gone up in flames like so many other obsessive, single-minded geniuses.
The Highs and Lows of Humanity
Why do people keep writing books (and making films) about these mad and maddening geniuses? Probably because people keep reading (and watching) them, which, of course, just pushes the question down a level: why are audiences so interested in mad genius? Zweig suggests an answer in The Struggle With the Daemon, where he argues that the call to greatness sounds within every person’s soul, though it’s louder in some, softer in others:
“It seems as if nature had implanted into every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were interminably striving — with tense passion — to rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives.”
Zweig goes on to write that although this is a drive that lives within us all, many of us suppress it by adhering to social norms. Seeing this call answered so bravely and brazenly by the great figures of our time inspires admiration. We’re all stars glowing in the sky, but some shine more brightly than others. The burning streak of the shooting star dazzles us with its brief but brilliant pass through the sky.
And that’s the selfishness at the centre of our fixation on “great people” — we get to enjoy the light they create, and the heat, from a safe distance. We thrill at the fireworks while paying no cost, risking no harm to ourselves. This fascination rarely survives a close encounter with one of these shooting stars when it singes us, sometimes burning so badly we think we might be turned to ash along with the burning genius we let get too close.
We’ll always love our superhumans and continue filling myths with grand figures who embody T. S. Eliot’s oft-quoted maxim that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go”. These are the people who reach peak experiences we can only dream of; they explore uncharted lands; they expand our maps of the mind. Most importantly, they bring the fruits of the highest branches down from the trees they climb and share the bounty in great works of art and advances in science.
We need explorers of the fringe, but as they approach the limit and the rewards increase, so does the risk of falling over the edge. Beyond their feats of mind and body, beyond the books and music and movies they make, beyond adding the cream to the coffee of life, adding a thrill to the ordinary, a hint of the sublime to the sublunary, beyond all of that they stand as symbols for the highs and lows of humanity. They are tales of inspiration and caution. This is what you could achieve — but this is what it could cost you.
So we read their stories and dream their dreams, happy that these wonderful, awful few are willing to pay the price.
Also known as The Royal Game and Chess Story. All quotations used here come from Anthea Bell’s translation.
His father was a poor boatman “whose tiny craft had been run down one night by a freight steamer carrying grain”, a detail Zweig seeds his story with and moves on from; rather than tending to its growth to ensure a particular kind of bloom, he’s content to let it grow organically in the garden of the reader’s mind. Others might have tilled that ground to make it fertile enough for a whole chapter, or at least nurtured it into a full-blown metaphor about industrialisation and the plight of those left behind. Not Zweig — he has the wisdom of a master craftsman to know how to focus on his central story and the skill to leave his sharper readers with some texture to play with.
This set up makes the game that follows read like a symbol for the battle between populism and the elite. The point isn’t belaboured, and might not be intentional, but it’s inescapable to a modern reader.
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing