First published in 1942
Translated by Anthea Bell
jh: 
Penguin Classics 2011
…
‘The first glance was a disappointment, and even made me feel a kind of bitter anger: the book I had carried off at such great peril and was looking forward to with such ardent expectation was nothing but a chess manual, a collection of a hundred and fifty championship matches. If I hadn’t been locked and barred in I’d have flung the book through an open window in my first rage, for what use was this nonsense to me, what could I do with it? As a schoolboy, like most others, I had sat at a chessboard now and then out of boredom. But what good was this theoretical stuff going to be? You can’t play chess without a partner, and certainly not without chessmen and a chessboard. Morosely, I leafed through the pages, hoping I might yet find something there to read, a foreword, an introduction; but I found only the bare, square patterns of the boards for the various games, and under them symbols of which I could make nothing at first: a2–a3, Nfl–g3, and so on. It all seemed to me a kind of algebra to which I had no key.
…