Stefan Zweig wrote the novel "The Chess Player" only months before his death, and it was published a year after his suicide, where it is considered today as a will among his works.
In it, we meet two personalities whose contrast is the same as between the white and black squares on the chessboard. They are the world champion in this game, the disliked, rude and arrogant, but dangerous tactician, and Mr. B, the modest and elegant aristocrat who always played mental chess when he was a prisoner during the Nazi occupation of Austria. This challenge between the two players embodies the conflict that was taking place on the world stage at the time, and one of the victims of which was Stefan Zweig.
In this wonderful novel, Stefan Zweig excels once again in analyzing the human psyche with accuracy and skill, and in "analyzing the beautiful and great stage that we live in today," in the words of one of the novel's characters.
