It is the story of Dr. B., which, by the chance of coincidence, learns the subtleties of chess with a book, which transforms this game into a passion and gradually captures the brain fever because of his passion, apparently chess. But deep down, it’s a farewell letter, actually. The chess that Stefan Zweig wrote when he was exiled in Brazil and completed a few months before his suicide in February 1942 points to the extinction of European culture under National Socialist peril. Zweig’s latest masterpiece, which chooses to say goodbye to the European culture by saying goodbye to life, is a short but extraordinary long story with the texture of chess, the tense fiction and the spiritual tides of the hero.