The Pawn on the Chessboard

Irène NémirovskyLe Pion sur l’échiquierSet in France during the economic crisis of the nineteen-thirties, Le Pion sur l’échiquier is an unflinching portrait of a man for whom life has lost all meaning. Son of a dying steel magnate whose investments crashed, Christophe Bohun works in an International News Agency and lives together with his dying father, wife, mistress and son, in dilapidated grandeur. At a time of external hardship, he appears to have everything and value nothing. Where his father was driven by a ruthless passion for high finance and his teenage son is eaten up with suppressed anger, Némirovsky presents us with an anti-hero whose bleak interior life is an object lesson in alienation and emotional numbness.

Irène Némirovsky was born in 1903 to a wealthy Jewish banking family, who fled the Russian revolution and settled in Paris when she was sixteen years old. In childhood she was educated by a French governess, and she later attended the Sorbonne. She wrote Le Pion sur l’échiquier in 1932-33 during the period following her father’s death. It first appeared in the daily paper, L’Intransigeant and subsequently in book form in 1934. Its publication coincided with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Ten years later both she and her husband were to die in Auschwitz. Their two young daughters survived the war. In 2004 her unfinished novel, Suite Française, detailing the Nazi invasion of France and its aftermath, was published and hailed as a masterpiece. The manuscript had been preserved unrecognised for many years by her children.