Backstory About "Zugzwang", A Serial Novel

As his serialised thriller Zugzwang, exclusively written for The Observer, is published as a book, novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett reveals the fear and exhilaration of writing to a weekly deadline. This is a fascinating look at the process of how a novel came to be - first in serial form - now in book form - by author Ronan Bennett. Sunday September 2, 2007 The Observer The idea for a novel never comes in one fell swoop, at least not to me. Usually, it's a case of something I read, or see, or something somebody tells me, and my filing it away in a mental 'things of interest that might lead somewhere' folder. It might remain there undisturbed, for months, even years, and then something else I stumble on seems to add enough to make me think I may have the beginnings of a novel. With Zugzwang, the earliest thing I filed away was the story of Akiba Rubinstein. Before the First World War, Rubinstein was one of the strongest chess players in the world. Born into an impoverished family in a remote settlement in Poland, which was then occupied by Russia, he was raised by his pious Jewish grandparents and spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish until around the age of 20. Rubinstein was pathologically shy, believing his mere presence to be unbearable to others. A contemporary observed how, immediately after making his move, Rubinstein would leave the chess table and hide, in order not to burden his opponent with his odious presence. This poignant scene stayed in my memory more than 25 years after I first read it. But though I had filed him away, Rubinstein had gathered a lot of mental dust. It was only when rereading an old biography of Lenin, by David Shub, that I started to think again about him. Shub's book describes the strange career of a protege of Lenin's, Roman Malinowski. With Lenin in exile, Malinowski became the party's leader inside Russia, and in St Petersburg headed the Social Democrat delegation in the Duma. What Lenin didn't know was that Malinowski was a spy for the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. He unmasked himself in the late spring of 1914 before fleeing to France. That's interesting, I thought: Rubinstein was also in St Petersburg in the spring of 1914, playing in the strongest chess tournament the world had seen. In those days, chess players were as celebrated as modern footballers, and that tournament was like the World Cup coming to town. Tsar Nicholas contributed 1,000 roubles to the prize fund. This was fertile territory, surely. There was the glamour and tension of the tournament, the pathos of the mentally flawed chess genius, the betrayal of Malinowski and the approach of war. There were revolutionaries and spies and the drama of St Petersburg itself, monumental and shabby, graceful and malign. There had to be a novel here. Rest of the story...