"Zugzwang" by Ronan Bennet:
A Chess Thriller
It's an understatement to say chess has been good for
literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to
produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer
Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I Russia: "I
watched the . . . board descending into a state of incomprehensible complexity,
with virtually every piece exposed to attack; this sent me into a state of pure
ecstasy."
One doesn't really need to play chess to recognize the
ecstatic state Prokofiev describes; it arises, as well, from other deeply
obsessive pursuits. Similarly, one isn't really required to play chess in order
to relish the twin peaks of twentieth-century chess fiction, Vladmir Nabokov's
"The Defense", and Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story".
In the case of "The Defense", you need never have
accepted (or declined) a Queen's Gambit, fallen for a poisoned pawn, or
experimented with a hypermodern defense to thrill to Nabokov's saying of
Luzhin, the book's chess anti-hero, that:
he felt quite clearly that this or that . . . square was
occupied by a definite, concentrated force, so that he envisioned the movement of a piece as a discharge, a
shock, a stroke of lightning --
and the whole chess field
quivered with tension, and over this tension he was sovereign, here gathering in and there releasing
electric power.
Likewise, with "Chess Story" you can be utterly
innocent of chess mechanics and still appreciate Zweig's characterizing chess
geekdom by saying that, "unworldly as they seem, [the players] burrow like
termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a
strange and utterly individual image of the world."
But Ronan Bennett's recent novel, "Zugzwang", is a
different sort of entry into the field of chess fiction, one that prefers not
to spare you the nitty-gritty of the game. The book is a chess noir in which
the ability to play, and to comprehend the system of algebraic notation used to
record games, adds another dimension to the tale. Unlike Nabokov and Zweig,
Bennett isn't content to keep chess itself offstage, while harvesting the exotic
effects -- from mental breakdown to ecstatic states -- that the game can
generate in susceptible minds. If you're squeamish about, say, capturing en
passant; if you've never heard of Nimzovitch and if the very name Bobby Fischer
neither excites nor demoralizes you (or both), it could be you'll only get half
of Bennett's noir. It could also be that is enough.
The novel is set on the eve of the First World War in St.
Petersburg, where a chess tournament -- modeled on the one that so aroused
Prokofiev -- draws the day's chess luminaries to the "ballroom of P.A.
Saburov's magnificent house on Liteiny Prospect." Outside the
mansion, Tsarism and its enemies
are provoking each other to ever more violent confrontations. Plus, there are
splits on each side, as a result of which some autocrats and some
revolutionaries wind up colluding in a plot to give the Tsar a Benazir Bhutto
type farewell. Whether they'll succeed or not is linked to success and failure
in the Saburov ballroom.
"Zugzwang" is rich in historical detail: A man
named Dzugashvili, for example, known to posterity as Stalin, flits through the
pages hounded by police, and Lenin, at the head of the Bolshevik Central
Committee, can be heard propounding from afar. "Zugzwang" is an
historical thriller that makes good use of the fact that chess games are
thrillers, too.
The book's main character, Otto Spethmann, a psychoanalyst,
is perfectly positioned to take up a recurrent theme of chess fiction, the
curious connection between chess greatness and looniness. The danger of
derangment is personified in the book by Spethmann's patient, Avrom Rozental, a
stellar player favored to win the tournament until he starts falling to pieces
in a manner his analyst can make sense of only by consulting certain passages in
the Talmud. Spethmann says of Rozental that: "Whenever I looked at him, I
was put in mind of a child who has lost his parents in a crowd. Chess was
Rozental's life. Beyond this was a void."
Spethmann plays chess himself, and is engaged, when the book
begins, in what he expects will be another friendly contest with R.M. Kopelzon,
a celebrated violinist. This is the game Bennett diagrams and analyzes, asking
about one position: "Is this any good?" and about another: "Can
White make further progress?" As the plot thickens, this game turns out
not to be recreational but momentous. When Spethmann tells himself he has to be
"utterly precise and utterly ruthless," and that, "Everything
depended on the f-pawn," he knows that the lowly f-pawn governs the fate
of his lover and his daughter, and marks a turning point in Russian history.
Spethmann's game with Kopelzon heads toward an unusual
position known as zugzwang, which is predicated on the fact that in chess
refusing to move is not an option, and that in some cases every remaining move
seems destined to bring on ruin. Providing genuine chess moves does not prevent
Bennett from mining the game, as have many before him -- Samuel Beckett, for
example, with "Endgame" -- for metaphors. Zugzwang is Bennett's
metaphor for a Russia hurtling toward war, chaos, and revolution. "When
things reach this pitch," he concludes, "we are all in zugzwang. Past
wrongs will not be forgiven. Rage and numbers will tell."
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