Earlier this year Penguin published 90 small paperback books in a new series, “Penguin Archive”, to mark the publisher’s 90 years of existence. I bought just eight of these books (though there are some more I’d stil like to get) of which I’ve so far read five, including (obviously) the two I’m going to write about today. Of the others I’ve read, I’m quite likely to write in future about Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (I’ve recently read two more of her books after doggedly ignoring her for years) and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. The books in the series are all short: today’s two are each under 100 pages.

Both books are translations, Hrabal’s from Czech by Edith Pargeter and Zweig’s from German by the prolific, versatile Anthea Bell. I don’t think I’ve written before in this newsletter about translated work; I’ll have to think about why that is.

Zweig’s book is concerned with a chess game between the world champion, Czentovic, and an opponent whom the narrator refers to only as “Dr B”, on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Dr B had been a lawyer in Vienna, having inherited from his father a discreet, inconspicuous but highly influential firm that had helped the imperial family and other wealthy people to hide their assets from the encroaching Nazis. After the annexation of Austria, Dr B had been arrested and placed in solitary confinement, not in a bare concrete cell but in a normal hotel room. However, he was held without books, newspapers, writing materials or any kind of mental stimulation or distraction, and with no contact with anybody but his jailers and interrogators.

After some months of this brutal deprivation, Dr B managed to steal a book from the pocket of a military overcoat which was hanging in the anteroom where he had been waiting (it seemed interminably) to be interrogated. At first he was thoroughly dejected to find that the book was a record of 150 chess games, not something he could actually read. But in time, for want of something better to do, he began to follow and learn the games, having worked out how to interpret the unfamiliar algebraic notation. Over several months, he learned all the games and began to make up new ones in his head. As he later tells the narrator:

… even the briefest reflection should be enough to show that as chess is a game of pure thought involving no element of chance, it’s a logical absurdity to try playing against yourself. At heart the attraction of chess resides entirely in the development of strategies in two different brains, in the fact that Black doesn’t know what manoeuvres White will perform in this war of the mind, and keeps trying to guess them and thwart them, while White himself is trying to anticipate and counter Black’s secret intentions. (p. 58)

The former lawyer explains to the narrator that if he were to avoid being driven mad, he felt that he had no choice but to attempt the self-contradictory task of knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Such dual thinking really presupposes a complete split of consciousness, and arbitrary ability to switch the function of the brain on and off again as if it were a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow. Well, to be brief, in my desperation I spent months trying to achieve this absurd impossibility. However I had no option but to pursue it, if I were not to fall victim to pure madness or see my mind waste away entirely. My desperate situation forced me at least to try splitting myself into a Black self and a White self, to keep from being crushed by the terrible void around me. (p. 59)

Dr B first comes to the narrator’s attention when he impulsively intervenes in a game between Czentovic and a group of passengers among whom are the narrator and a Scots engineer named McConnor who got rich in the Californian gold rush and is paying the grandmaster’s fee to play against them. Dr B’s intervention prevents a disastrous mistake on McConnor’s part, and he then guides the challengers to a draw. The following day, Dr B takes on Czentovic alone, having told his story to the narrator in the meantime, and asked him not to let the doctor-lawyer be drawn into playing a second game. Not having played an actual game against a real live opponent since his schooldays, he wanted to know if he was capable of playing outside his own head. Once that question had been answered one way or the other, he wanted to leave it at that.

What interests and intrigues me is just a retrospective curiosity to find out whether I was really playing chess in my cell or whether it was mere delusion, if I was on the edge of the dangerous precipice at the time or already over it — that’s all, nothing more. (p. 72)

The defeated champion immediately offers a rematch, which Dr B accepts without hesitation, in spite of his earlier request to the narrator to limit him to just one game. But Czentovic has noticed his opponent’s impatience, and begins to play as slowly as possible, taking the full ten minuted (the agreed maximum period between moves) before even the most obvious response. The former lawyer becomes increasingly agitated, pacing restlessly and apparently playing other games in his imagination. Eventually, he loses control and, at the narrator’s urging, is forced to resign. After Dr B has left the smoking room, saying he will never again attemmpt to play chess, Czentovic has the last word:

”A pity,” he said magnanimously. “It wasn’t a bad attack at all. For an amateur, that gentleman really is uncommonly gifted.” (p. 85)

Both his own apparent ability to do the impossible and split his consciousness, and Czentovic’s gamesmanship in their final confrontation, give the lie to Dr B’s assertion that “chess is a game of pure thought” (p. 58). It’s a sentiment that had earlier been voiced by the narrator, on discovering that he would be in Czentovic’s company on the voyage:

I knew the mysterious attraction of the “royal game”, the only game ever devised by mankind that rises magnificently above the tyranny of chance, awarding the palm of victory solely to the mind, or rather to a certain kind of mental gift. (p. 13)

The narrator looks forward to spending the 12 days of the voyage in proximity to Czentovic:

I have always been interested in any kind of monomaniac obsessed by a single idea, for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity; characters like this, apparently remote from reality, are like termites using their own material to build a remarkable and unique small-scale version of the world. (p. 11)

Czentovic, the orphaned son of “a poor South Slavonian boatman” (p. 2) had shown no sign of any intellectual or imaginative ability and no aptitude for anything except chess, at which he could defeat all comers. To his rivals for the world championship, “every one of them immesurably superior to him in intellectual talents, imagination and daring” (p. 8), he seemed a comically grotesque figure, a “dull-witted country boy” (p. 9). But that’s not to say that his sole and unique skill or ability was for playing chess. As the narrator’s friendly informant puts it:

“… For all his severe limitations, he’s a wily peasant and shrewd enough not to present himself as a target, by the simple means of avoiding all conversation except with fellow countrymen of his own background, whom he seeks out in small inns. When he feels he’s in the presence of an educated person he goes into his shell, so no one can boast of ever hearing him say something stupid, or of having assessed the apparently unplumbed depths of his ignorance.” (pp. 11–12)

As it transpires, the narrator doesn’t get any more out of the cagy grandmaster than anyone else has managed to do but finds a different specimen to study in the Viennese former lawyer. The result suggests that neither he nor Dr B is right about the rational and intellectual nature of the game. He himself admits that within the confines of th 64 squares there are “unlimited combinations” (p. 13), so that no normal human brain could foresee all the possible moves. Rather than an intellectual exercise, it’s a game that rewards a certain kind of cunningly aggressive instinct. Unlike other games, chess may be wholly without the element of chance, but unpredictablity, which is does have, is from the player’s point of view effectively indistinguishable from chance.

The events of the novella take place at or just before the start of the Second World War: Dr B’s arrest occurs immediately after the resignation of the Austrian Chancellor in 1938, he is held for several months, and the book is published in 1941. Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains is set as the war is coming to an end: the climax coincides with the firebombing of Dresden. Both these novellas have first-person narrators but, while Zweig’s is largely and observer, Hrabal’s is directly involved in the action.

He is Miloš Hrma, an apprentice dispatcher at a small but busy Czech railway station. Miloš is in his early 20s but seems a bit younger. As the story opens, he is returning to work after a three-month period of convalescence, following an attempt to kill himself by slashing his wrists in a hotel bathroom. We learn late in the story that Miloš has attempted to do away with himself after he fails to have sex with his inamorata, Masha, and as a result doubts his own manhood. Masha is a conductor on the trains that pass through Miloš’s station. She and he have declared their love for each other, and she has visited him at night while they’re staying at her uncle’s photographic studio, but he (in his own words) “wilted like a lily” (p. 76).

Miloš hero-worships the station’s dispatcher Hubička who can sleep on duty without missing anything important and has a reputation as a success with women, notwithstanding an unprepossessing appearance. Hubička originally trained Miloš and is now supervising him again following his three months off work. Miloš tells the station-master about one of Hubička’s sexual escapades at a different station during Miloš’s training, when the oilcloth covering on the station-master’s couch was ripped. Hubička is now under investigation for a possible “felonious infringement of personal liberty” (p. 52) arising from a game of forfeits between him and the station’s then telegraphist, Virginia, when they were both on night duty and bored. Virginia’s mother was outraged to find that her daughter’s backside bore the inkmarks of all the station’s official stamps, and complained.

The station-master is appalled at Hubička’s behaviour and calls him a pig, but finds that others, including Prince Kinský, who seems to be the station-master’s patron, are impressed by the dispatcher’s élan. The prince wants to meet him.

At a hearing before the Traffic Chief and some councillors, Virginia denies that she had been bullied or coerced into the game of forfeits, so Hubička is not finally charged with infringement of personal liberty, but he still faces disciplinary proceedings for debasing the German language, which was used on some of the stamps. That would still presumably be enough to lose him his job.

Masha asks Miloš to come to see her in two days’ time. In the meantime she’ll ask some of the older girls for advice on how to have sex, and she’s sure it will work out. As the novella’s climactic event approaches, Miloš seeks reassurance that he really is a man. He approaches the station-master’s wife, who tells him:

“But Miloš, I’m in the change already, I don’t want to have anything to do with all that any more, really, I do understand, and if I were younger … Holy Virgin, what’s got into you all on this station? First, it’s Dispatcher Hubička with those stamps, and now you rubbing the velvet off your antlers … But everything will be all right the day after tomorrow, you’ll see, you’re a man all right, very much so.” (p. 72)

As things turn out, Miloš and Masha never get to have sex together but any lingering doubt that Miloš may have about his masculinity is resolved by the mysterious Viktoria Freie (presumably a nom de guerre) who has come to the station to provide Hubička and Miloš with the explosive charge that the latter will drop into the middle carriage of a long goods train carrying German munitions.

Sex and violence are strongly associated in this story. It’s probable that Viktoria Freie’s motive in relieving Miloš of his burdensome virginity was reinforce his sense of masculinity and shore up his resolve to destroy the munitions train.

A recurring motif in the novella is the cruel treatment of animals. The station-master breeds pigeons, of whom he seems to take great care. When the Germans invade Czechoslovakia, he shuts his Nurembergs in their loft and, leaving instructions that their necks are to be wrung, he goes off for a week to find some Polish silver-points to replace them. His wife is a calm, capable woman who regularly kills rabbits by cutting their necks with a blunt knife and letting them bleed slowly to death. She said that killing them in this way made the meat tastier and more tender. When Miloš returns from his convalescence, she is force-feeding a gander who, when he has been fattened up, will be killed in the same manner.

A train that passes through the station coming back from the front, ten days away, carries cows and sheep who are starving and some of whom have died in place. The cows have kicked through the floors of their carriages and their bruised feet drag along the track. Miloš finds the sight unbearable: “‘These Germans are swine!’ I cried” (p. 47). A bull being taken to the slaughterhouse has his eyes casually poked out with a knife to “calm” him. If animals are cruelly treated, we’re repeatedly reminded that the humans are animals too. The Germans are “swine”, as Miloš said. The station-master regards Hubička not just as a pig but as a cannibal: “… But for that grunting pig nothing exists but pork, dumplings and cabbage …” (p. 20)

The blinding of the bull is echoed at the end of the story when Miloš shoots a dying German soldier through the eye (with the soldier’s own rifle). He does so, not to put an end to the soldier’s suffering, though it incidentally has that effect, but to silence the German whose marching in place and incessant calls for “Mutti” (Miloš thinks he means his children’s rather than his own) are making Miloš’s own last moments unbearable. The two dying men have shot each other: Miloš has been hit in the lung and is coughing up blood, the soldier was shot in the belly, so was dying slowly and in agony, till Miloš ended his life.

Earlier, Miloš had thought that the man who saved his life in the hotel bathroom was God. Now, it dawns on him that “I had been predestined for another death than the one I had attempted there in Bystřice by Benešov” (p. 92).

The novella was published in Czech in 1965 and the film adaptation by Jiři Menzel came out 3 years later, at about the same time as the repression of the Prague Spring. A work about resistance to the Nazi occupation that had ended 20 years earlier would not in itself be unacceptable to the Communist authorities though once the Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague, the parallels between the earlier period and the later would be harder to deny.

I read the book for the first time earlier this year. I had seen Menzel’s film a few times before that, though not for many years. I used to have a copy that came on a CD (before I ever had a DVD player) with, if I’m remembering correctly, one of the Sunday newspapers. I don’t know what happened to the CD: I haven’t seen it for almost 25 years.

My impression is that the film was more uplifting than the book — not nearly as grim — though they tell the same story. Maybe my memory is misleading me or perhaps I wasn’t paying full attention while I watched the film. At any rate, the novella is undoubtedly bleak.

Editions: Penguin Archive paperbacks, 2025; I’ve omitted quotation marks when quoting passages from Dr B’s account of his confinement by the Germans in Chess. Ellipses are original except where occurring at the beginning of a quotation.