Şahmat

Zweig's last work, finished in Brazilian exile shortly before he took his own life in 1942. A chess prodigy meets a man who learned the game entirely in his head while held in solitary confinement by the Gestapo, with nothing to read.

It is a novella about what isolation does to a mind, written by someone who had watched the culture he belonged to destroyed. The chess is real; the subject is not chess.