The Royal Game

For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing

this gentleman is really extraordinarily talented

this gentleman is really extraordinarily talented

My only interest, the only attraction for me, is a postmortem curiosity to know whether that was chess or madness in the cell, whether at that time I was just on the brink or already over the edge—that’s all, nothing else.”

Suddenly I seemed to hear voices behind me, living human voices speaking words, and you cannot imagine my joy, for it had been months, almost a year since I had heard words other than the harsh, cutting, malignant ones of my questioners. ‘You’re dreaming,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re dreaming! Whatever you do, don’t open your eyes! Let it go on, this dream, or you’ll see that accursed room around you again, the chair and the washstand and the table and the wall-paper with the pattern always the same. You’re dreaming—go on dreaming!’

Something in me wanted to come out on top, and yet all there was for me to fight was this other me in me;

The only reason that this activity had become such a salutary and even soothing one for my shattered nerves was that playing through games that were not my own did not involve me personally; it was all the same to me whether Black or White won, it was Alekhine or Bogoljubov who was battling for the laurels of the champion, and I as a person, my intellect, my spirit took part solely as an observer, as a connoisseur of the peripeteias and the beauties of each game. But from the moment I began to play against myself, I began unwittingly to challenge myself. Each of my two selves, the black one and the white one, had to vie against the other, and each conceived its own ambition, its own impatience, to gain the ascendancy, to win; after each move as White, I was in a fever to know what Black would do. Each of the two selves exulted when the other made a mistake and became exasperated at its own bungling.

At first I played the games through quite mechanically;

You waited for something from morning until night, and nothing happened. You went on waiting and waiting. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, thinking, thinking, thinking, until your temples throbbed. Nothing happened. You were alone. Alone. Alone.

During the last moves he must have recognized his real, his true opponent just as a horse knows a new, better rider by the way he takes the saddle.