"The improbable had happened, the world champion, the champion of countless tournaments had waved the flag in front of an unknown, a man who had not touched a chessboard for twenty or twenty-five years. Our friend, the Anonymus, the Ignotus, had defeated the strongest chess player on earth in open combat!The amazement is great when the inconspicuous Dr. B., Austrian emigrant on a passenger steamer from New York to Buenos Aires, rather coincidentally competes against the reigning world chess champion Mirko Czentovic and defeats his mechanically experienced opponent with playful ease. But the game of chess brings to light memories of the terror of his imprisonment under National Socialism and reopens a mental wound, which again threatens Dr. B.'s mental health.The Chess Novel is a novel by Stefan Zweig, which he wrote between 1938 and 1941 in exile in Brazil. It is his last and at the same time his most famous work. The first edition was published on December 7, 1942 in Buenos Aires in a limited edition of 300 copies.Under the impression of German successes in the war and exhausted by involuntary migration and the loss of his - above all spiritual - homeland Europe, the sixty-year-old took his own life together with his wife Lotte on February 23, 1942.