discussion points - the royal game (chess story) by stefan zweig

1. What is your impression of these characters in the book? Considering the book’s length, did you find the characters to be underdeveloped? Did you find them to be realistic? What were these characters’ purposes and roles in the book?

a. Mirko Czentovic?

b. Dr. B?

c. McConnor?

d. The narrator?

2. What do you think of the location in which the story is set? Why do you think Zweig chose to have the story unravel in the middle of the ocean onboard a streamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires?

3. The game of chess is at the center of the events of this book, do you play chess? Did this book make you more, or less interested?

4. Stefan Zweig was known to be fascinated by the field of psychology, do you think this was reflected in this book?

5. Zweig unfortunately ended his own life months after writing Chess Story, how do you think this book fares as his goodbye letter to the world?

6. “Isn’t it damn easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t troubled by the slightest notion that a Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, or Napoleon ever existed?”

7. “All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.”

8. “They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.”

9. “But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?”