Original buckram-backed blue boards, gilt title to spine. First European edition, first printing, very scarce.

Zweig's great chess novella was first printed in Buenos Aires in 1942, but that edition is very rare - the Stockholm edition is the first printed on the continent that Zweig had fled. One of the most popular writers in the world in the 1920s and 30s, Zweig fled Austria in 1934 facing the rise of fascism, and the Nazis banned his books. He settled eventually in Petropolis, Brazil (where the true first edition of Schachnovelle was printed in minimal numbers), until, despairing for the future of humanity, he and his wife took their lives in 1942 with an overdose of barbiturates.
Schachnovelle, in which the chess-mad protagonist is found fleeing persecution in Europe on a cruise ship bound to South America, masterfully reflects these anxieties.

This copy has an apt contemporary provenance, with the ownership stamp of another European emigré, German violinist Emil Kornsand (1894-1973), who, in 1938, fled to America and played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for over two decades. The front free endpaper bears the contemporary bookseller's ticket of Schoenhof's Foreign Books of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Kornsand's inscription "To Mama", dated July 11, 1946, evidently sending the book to Germany after the war was over.

Language: German
Pages: 117
Edition: First European edition
Publisher: Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1943
Condition: Good