S. Zweig is known as a master of biographies and short stories. He created and developed his own models of the small genre, different from the generally accepted norms. The works of Zweig Stefan are real literature with elegant language, impeccable plot and images of characters, which impresses with its dynamics and demonstration of the movement of the human soul.
Writer's family
S. Zweig was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 in a family of Jewish bankers. Stefan's grandfather, the father of Ida Brettauer's mother, was a Vatican banker, his father, Maurice Zweig, a millionaire, was engaged in the sale of textiles. The family was educated, the mother strictly raised her sons Alfred and Stefan. The spiritual basis of the family is theatrical performances, books, music. Despite numerous prohibitions, the boy from childhood valued personal freedom and achieved what he wanted.
The beginning of the creative path
He began to write early, the first articles appeared in the journals of Vienna and Berlin in 1900. After the gymnasium, he entered the university at the Faculty of Philology, where he studied Germanic and Romanistic studies. As a freshman, he published the collection Silver Strings. Composers M. Reder and R. Strauss wrote music on his poems. At the same time, the first short stories of the young author were published.
In 1904 he graduated from the university with a Ph.D. In the same year he published a collection of short stories "The Love of Erica Ewald" and translations of poems by E. Verharn, a Belgian poet. The next two years, Zweig travels a lot - India, Europe, Indochina, America. During the war he writes anti-war works.
Tries to know life in all its diversity. He collects notes, manuscripts, objects of great people, as if he wants to know the course of their thoughts. At the same time, he does not shy away from the "outcasts", the homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics, seeks to know their life. He reads a lot, meets famous people - O. Rodin, R. M. Rilke, E. Verharn. They occupy a special place in Zweig's life, influencing his work.
Personal life
In 1908, Stefan saw F. Winternitz, they exchanged glances, but they remembered this meeting for a long time. Frederica was going through a difficult period, a break with her husband was close. A few years later, they met by chance and, without even talking, recognized each other. After a second chance meeting, Frederica wrote him a dignified letter in which a young woman expresses admiration for Zweig's translations of The Flowers of Life.
Before linking their lives, they met for a long time, Frederica understood Stefan, treated him warmly and carefully. He is calm and happy with her. Separated, they exchanged letters. Zweig Stefan is sincere in his feelings, he tells his wife about his experiences, emerging depressions. The couple are happy. Having lived a long and happy 18 years, in 1938 they divorced. Stefan marries a year later his secretary Charlotte, devoted to him to death, both literally and figuratively.
State of soul
Doctors periodically send Zweig to rest from "overwork". But he cannot fully relax, he is known, he is recognized. It is difficult to judge what the doctors meant by "overwork", physical fatigue or mental, but the intervention of doctors was necessary. Zweig traveled a lot, Frederica had two children from her first marriage, and she could not always accompany her husband.
The writer's life is filled with meetings, travels. The 50th anniversary is approaching. Zweig Stefan feels discomfort, even fear. He writes to his friend V. Flyasher that he is not afraid of anything, even death, but he is afraid of illness and old age. He recalls the spiritual crisis of L. Tolstoy: "The wife has become a stranger, the children are indifferent." It is not known whether Zweig had real reasons for concern, but in his mind they were.
Emigration
Heating up in Europe. Unknown people searched Zweig's house. The writer went to London, his wife stayed in Salzburg. Perhaps because of the children, perhaps, she remained to solve some problems. But, judging by the letters, the relationship between them seemed warm. The writer became a citizen of Great Britain, wrote tirelessly, but was sad: Hitler was gaining strength, everything was collapsing, genocide loomed. In May, in Vienna, the writer's books were publicly burned at the stake.
Against the background of the political situation, a personal drama developed. The writer was frightened by his age, he was full of worries about the future. In addition, emigration also affected. Despite outwardly favorable circumstances, it requires a lot of mental effort from a person. Zweig Stefan and in England, and in America, and in Brazil was enthusiastically received, treated kindly, his books were sold out. But I didn't want to write. In the midst of all these difficulties, a tragedy occurred with a divorce from Frederica.
In the last letters, one feels a deep spiritual crisis: “The news from Europe is terrible”, “I will no longer see my home”, “I will be a temporary guest everywhere”, “the only thing left is to leave with dignity, quietly.” On February 22, 1942, he passed away after taking a large dose of sleeping pills. Charlotte passed away with him.
ahead of time
Zweig often created fascinating biographies at the intersection of art and document. He didn't turn them into anything entirely artistic, or documentary, or true novels. Zweig's determining factor in compiling them was not only his own literary taste, but also the general idea that followed from his view of history. The heroes of the writer were people who were ahead of their time, standing above the crowd and opposing it. From 1920 to 1928, the three-volume "Builders of the World" was published.
- The first volume of The Three Masters about Dickens, Balzac and Dostoyevsky was published in 1920. Such different writers in one book? The best explanation would be a quote from Stefan Zweig: the book shows them "as types of world artists who created in their novels a second reality along with the existing one."
- The author dedicated the second book, The Fight Against Madness, to Kleist, Nietzsche, Hölderlin (1925). Three geniuses, three destinies. Each of them was driven by some supernatural force into a cyclone of passion. Under the influence of their demon, they experienced a split, when chaos pulls forward, and the soul back to humanity. They end up in madness or suicide.
- In 1928, the last volume of "Three Singers of Their Life" saw the light of day, telling about Tolstoy, Stendhal and Kazanov. The author did not accidentally combine these disparate names in one book. Each of them, no matter what he wrote, filled the works with his own "I". Therefore, the names of the greatest master of French prose, Stendhal, the seeker and creator of the moral ideal of Tolstoy, and the brilliant adventurer Casanova, are side by side in this book.
human fate
Zweig's dramas "Comedian", "City by the Sea", "Legend of One Life" did not bring stage success. But his historical novels and stories have gained worldwide fame, they have been translated into many languages and reprinted many times. In the stories of Stefan Zweig, the most intimate human experiences are tactfully and yet frankly described. Zweig's short stories are captivating in their plots, full of tension and intensity.
The writer tirelessly convinces the reader that the human heart is defenseless, how incomprehensible human destinies are, and what crimes or accomplishments passion pushes. These include unique, stylized as medieval legends, psychological novels "Street in the Moonlight", "Letter from a Stranger", "Fear", "First Experience". In Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, the author describes a passion for gain that can kill all living things in a person.
In the same years, collections of short stories Starry Humanities (1927), Confusion of Feelings (1927), and Amok (1922) were published. In 1934, Zweig was forced to emigrate. He lived in the UK, USA, the choice of the writer fell on Brazil. Here the writer publishes a collection of essays and speeches "Meetings with People" (1937), a piercing novel about unrequited love "Impatience of the Heart" (1939) and "Magellan" (1938), memoirs "Yesterday's World" (1944).
history book
Separately, it must be said about the works of Zweig, in which historical figures became heroes. In this case, the writer was alien to the conjecture of any facts. He masterfully worked with documents, in any testimony, letter, memoir, he sought out, first of all, the psychological background.
- The book "The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam" includes essays and novels dedicated to scientists, travelers, thinkers Z. Freud, E. Rotterdam, A. Vespucci, Magellan.
- "Mary Stuart" by Stefan Zweig is the best biography of the tragically beautiful and eventful life of the Scottish queen. It is still full of unresolved mysteries.
- In Marie Antoinette, the author spoke about the tragic fate of the queen, who was executed by decision of the Revolutionary Tribunal. This is one of the most truthful and thoughtful novels. Marie Antoinette was pampered by the attention and admiration of the courtiers, her life is a series of pleasures. She had no idea that outside the opera house there is a world mired in hatred and poverty, which threw her under the knife of the guillotine.
As readers write in their reviews of Stefan Zweig, all his works are incomparable. Each has its own shade, taste, life. Even read-reread biographies are like an insight, like a revelation. It's like reading about a completely different person. There is something fantastic in the writing style of this writer - you feel the power of the word over you and drown in its all-consuming power. You understand that his works are fiction, but you clearly see the hero, his feelings and thoughts.
Biographical information
Creation
In 1910, Zweig wrote three volumes of Verharn (a biography and translations of his dramas and poetry). Zweig considered the translations of Verhaarn, as well as C. Baudelaire, P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud, as his contribution to the spiritual community of European peoples dear to him.
In 1907 Zweig wrote a tragedy in verse, Thersites, which takes place near the walls of Troy; the idea of the play is a call for compassion for the humiliated and lonely. The premiere took place simultaneously in Dresden and Kassel.
In 1909, Zweig began to write a book about O. de Balzac, on which he worked for about 30 years. The book was never finished (published in 1946, after Zweig's death).
In 1917, Zweig published the anti-war drama Jeremiah based on the plot of the book of the prophet Jeremiah. The pathos of the play is the rejection of violence. Jeremiah predicts the fall of Jerusalem and calls to submit to Nebuchadnezzar, for "there is nothing more important than peace."
Scourge of vices, Jeremiah sees a way out in moral perfection. Exactly following the events set forth in the Bible, Zweig makes one digression reflecting his position: in the book, the blinded king of Judea, Tsidkiyahu, is taken captive in chains; in Zweig’s drama, he is solemnly brought to Babylon on a stretcher. "Jeremiah" - the first anti-war play on the European stage - was staged in 1918 in Zurich, in 1919 - in Vienna.
The legend “The Third Dove” (1934) symbolically expresses the pacifist denial of war and the idea of the impossibility of achieving peace: the third dove sent by Noah in search of land does not return, it circles forever above the earth in vain attempts to find a place where peace reigns.
Jewish theme
The Jewish motif is present in Zweig's anti-war short story "Mendel the second-hand book dealer" (1929). The quiet Jew from Galicia, Jacob Mendel, is obsessed with books. Its services are used by book lovers, including university professors.
Mendel is not interested in money, he does not know what is happening behind the walls of the Viennese cafe, where his desk is. During the war, he is arrested and charged with espionage after discovering that he sent a postcard to Paris to a bookstore owner.
Mendel is held for two years in the camp, he returns a broken man. "Mendel the second-hand book dealer" is the only story by Zweig in which the Jewish hero is a contemporary of the writer.
The theme of Jewry occupies Zweig in a philosophical aspect; he refers to her in the legend “Rachel murmurs against God” (1930) and the story dedicated to Sh. Ash “The Buried Lamp” (1937; Russian translation - Jer., 1989).
The third - "Three poets of their lives" (1927) - J. Casanova, Stendhal, L. Tolstoy. Zweig believes that their works are an expression of their own personality.
For many years Zweig painted the historical miniatures The Starry Clock of Mankind (1927, expanded ed. - 1943).
The book "Meetings with People, Books, Cities" (1937) contains essays about writers, about meetings with A. Toscanini, B. Walter, an analysis of the work of I. V. Goethe, B. Shaw, T. Mann and many others.
Posthumous edition
Zweig considered Europe his spiritual homeland, his autobiographical book Yesterday's World (1941; published 1944) is filled with longing for Vienna, the center of European cultural life.
Notification: The preliminary basis for this article was the articleStefan was born in Vienna to Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish merchant who owned a textile manufactory. Little is known about the childhood and adolescence of the future writer: he himself spoke rather sparingly about this, emphasizing that at the beginning of his life everything was exactly the same as that of other European intellectuals at the turn of the century. After graduating from high school in 1900, Zweig entered the University of Vienna. Already during his studies, at his own expense, he published the first collection of his poems ("Silver Strings" (Silberne Saiten), 1901). The poems were written under the influence of Hofmannsthal, as well as Rilke, to whom Zweig ventured to send his collection. Rilke sent back his book. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Rilke's death in 1926.
After graduating from the University of Vienna and receiving his doctorate, Zweig went to London and Paris (1905), then traveled to Italy and Spain (1906), visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama (1912). The last years of the First World War he lived in Switzerland (1917-1918), and after the war he settled near Salzburg.
Zweig's short stories
Zweig's short stories - "Amok" (Amok, 1922), "Confusion of feelings" (Verwirrung der Gefuhle, 1927), "Mendel the bookseller" (1929), Chess short story (Schachnovelle, finished in 1941), as well as a cycle of historical short stories " Star Clock of Humanity "(Sternstunden der Menschheit, 1927) - made the author's name popular all over the world. The novels amaze with drama, captivate with unusual plots and make you think about the vicissitudes of human destinies. Zweig never ceases to convince of how defenseless the human heart is, to what feats, and sometimes crimes, passion pushes a person.
Zweig created and developed in detail his own model of the short story, different from the works of the generally recognized masters of the short genre. The events of most of his stories take place during travel, sometimes exciting, sometimes tiring, and sometimes truly dangerous. Everything that happens to the heroes lies in wait for them on the way, during short stops or short breaks from the road. Dramas play out in a matter of hours, but these are always the main moments of life, when personality is tested, the ability to self-sacrifice is tested. The core of each Zweig story is a monologue that the hero utters in a state of passion.
Zweig's short stories are a kind of summaries of novels. But when he tried to turn a single event into a spatial narrative, his novels turned into long, wordy short stories. Therefore, Zweig's novels from modern life generally did not work out. He understood this and rarely addressed the genre of the novel. They are Impatience of the Heart (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1938) and Rauch der Verwandlung, an unfinished novel published for the first time in German forty years after the death of the author, in 1982 (in Russian. trans. "Kristina Hoflener, 1985. In English translation, the novel was first published in 2008).
Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Joseph Fouche, Balzac (1940).
In historical novels, it is customary to invent a historical fact by the power of creative fantasy. Where there were not enough documents, the artist's imagination began to work there. Zweig, on the contrary, has always masterfully worked with documents, discovering psychological background in any letter or memoir of an eyewitness.
"Mary Stuart" (1935), "The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam" (1935)
The mysterious personality and fate of Mary Stuart, Queen of France, England and Scotland, will always excite the imagination of posterity. The author designated the genre of the book "Maria Stuart" (Maria Stuart, 1935) as a novelized biography. The Scottish and English queens never saw each other. This is what Elizabeth wanted. But between them for a quarter of a century there was an intense correspondence, outwardly correct, but full of hidden jabs and biting insults. The letters form the basis of the book. Zweig also used the testimonies of friends and foes of both queens to make an impartial verdict on both.
Having completed the biography of the beheaded queen, Zweig indulges in final reflections: “Morality and politics have their own different paths. Events are evaluated differently, depending on whether we judge them from the point of view of humanity or from the point of view of political advantages. For a writer in the early 30s. the conflict of morality and politics is no longer speculative, but quite tangible in nature, concerning him personally.
The hero of the book "The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam" (Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam, 1935) is especially close to Zweig. He was impressed that Erasmus considered himself a citizen of the world. Erasmus refused the most prestigious positions in the church and secular fields. A stranger to vain passions and vanity, he used all his efforts to achieve independence. With his books, he conquered the era, for he was able to say a clarifying word on all the painful problems of his time.
Erasmus condemned fanatics and scholastics, bribe takers and ignoramuses. But those who kindled discord between people were especially hated by him. However, due to the monstrous religious strife, Germany, and after it the whole of Europe, were stained with blood.
According to Zweig's concept, the tragedy of Erasmus is that he failed to prevent these massacres. Zweig believed for a long time that the First World War was a tragic misunderstanding, that it would remain the last war in the world. He believed that, together with Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, together with the German anti-fascist writers, he would be able to prevent a new world massacre. But in those days when he was working on a book about Erasmus, the Nazis ransacked his house. This was the first alarm.
Last years. "Yesterday's World"
The position of Zweig at the end of the 30s. was between the hammer and sickle on one side and the swastika on the other. That is why his final memoir, Yesterday's World, is so elegiac: the former world has disappeared, and in the present world he felt like a stranger everywhere. His last years are years of wanderings. He flees from Salzburg, choosing London as a temporary residence (1935). But even in England he did not feel protected. He went to Latin America (1940), then moved to the USA (1941), but soon decided to settle in the small Brazilian city of Petropolis, located high in the mountains. February 22, 1942 Zweig passed away with his wife, having taken a large dose of sleeping pills. Erich Maria Remarque wrote about this tragic episode in the novel “Shadows in Paradise”: “If that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could pour out their souls to someone at least by phone, misfortunes might not have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign land among strangers.
Zweig and Russia
Zweig fell in love with Russian literature in his gymnasium years, and then carefully read Russian classics while studying at the Vienna and Berlin universities. When in the late 20's. in our country, the collected works of Zweig began to appear, he, by his own admission, was happy. The preface to this twelve-volume edition of Zweig's works was written by Maxim Gorky. “Stefan Zweig,” Gorky emphasized, “is a rare and happy combination of the talent of a deep thinker with the talent of a first-class artist.” He especially highly appreciated Zweig's novelistic skill, his amazing ability to frankly and at the same time tactfully tell about the most intimate experiences of a person.
Zweig's interest in Russia had another reason: like many other Western writers, he saw in the USSR the only real force capable of resisting fascism. Zweig came to the USSR in 1928 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Leo Tolstoy, his favorite Russian writer.
Zweig was very skeptical about the turbulent bureaucratic activity of the leading elite of the Soviet republics. In general, his attitude towards the Land of the Soviets could then be described as benevolently critical curiosity. But over the years, goodwill waned, and skepticism grew. Zweig could not understand and accept the deification of the leader, and the falsity of the staged political trials did not mislead him. He categorically rejected the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which legitimized any acts of violence and terror.
Heritage
In 2006, the private charitable organization "Casa Stefan Zweig" was created, with the ultimate goal of creating the Stefan Zweig Museum in Petropolis - in the house where he and his wife lived for the last months and passed away.
Screen adaptations
Confusion of Feelings (1979) - a film by the Belgian director Etienne Perrier based on the short story of the same name by Zweig.
"A Burning Secret" (1988) - a film directed by Andrew Birkin, which won prizes at the Brussels and Venice Film Festivals.
Stefan Zweig. Born November 28, 1881 in Vienna - died February 23, 1942 in Brazil. Austrian critic, writer, author of numerous short stories and fictionalized biographies.
Father, Moritz Zweig (1845-1926), owned a textile factory.
Mother, Ida Brettauer (1854-1938), came from a family of Jewish bankers.
Little is known about the childhood and adolescence of the future writer: he himself spoke rather sparingly about this, emphasizing that at the beginning of his life everything was exactly the same as that of other European intellectuals at the turn of the century. After graduating from high school in 1900, Zweig entered the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy and in 1904 received his doctorate.
Already during his studies, at his own expense, he published the first collection of his poems ("Silver Strings" (Silberne Saiten), 1901). The poems were written under the influence of Hofmannsthal, as well as Rilke, to whom Zweig ventured to send his collection. Rilke sent back his book. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Rilke's death in 1926.
After graduating from the University of Vienna, Zweig went to London and Paris (1905), then traveled to Italy and Spain (1906), visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama (1912).
The last years of the First World War he lived in Switzerland (1917-1918), and after the war he settled near Salzburg.
Zweig married Friderike Maria von Winternitz in 1920. In 1938 they divorced. In 1939, Zweig married his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann (Lotte Altmann).
In 1934, after Hitler came to power in Germany, Zweig left Austria and went to London.
In 1940, Zweig and his wife moved to New York, and on August 22, 1940 - to Petropolis, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Experiencing severe disappointment and depression, on February 23, 1942, Zweig and his wife took a lethal dose of barbiturates and were found dead in their house, holding hands.
Zweig created and elaborated his own model of the novella, different from the works of generally recognized masters of the short genre. The events of most of his stories take place during travel, sometimes exciting, sometimes tiring, and sometimes truly dangerous. Everything that happens to the heroes lies in wait for them along the way, during short stops or short breaks from the road. Dramas play out in a matter of hours, but these are always the main moments of life, when personality is tested, the ability to self-sacrifice is tested. The core of each Zweig story is a monologue that the hero utters in a state of passion.
Zweig's short stories are a kind of summaries of novels. But when he tried to turn a single event into a spatial narrative, his novels turned into long, wordy short stories. Therefore, Zweig's novels from modern life generally did not work out. He understood this and rarely addressed the genre of the novel. These are Impatience of the Heart (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1938) and Rausch der Verwandlung, an unfinished novel published for the first time in German forty years after the death of the author in 1982 (in Russian. translated by Christina Hoflener ", 1985).
Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Joseph Fouche, (1940).
In historical novels, it is customary to invent a historical fact by the power of creative fantasy. Where there were not enough documents, the artist's imagination began to work there. Zweig, on the contrary, has always masterfully worked with documents, discovering psychological background in any letter or memoir of an eyewitness.
Novels by Stefan Zweig:
"Conscience vs. Violence: Castellio vs. Calvin" (1936)
"Amok" (Der Amokläufer, 1922)
Letter from a Stranger (Brief einer Unbekannten, 1922)
"Invisible Collection" (1926)
"Confusion of feelings" (Verwirrung der Gefühle, 1927)
"Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman" (1927)
"Star Clock of Humanity" (in the first Russian translation - Fatal Moments) (a cycle of short stories, 1927)
"Mendel the second-hand book dealer" (1929)
"Chess novel" (1942)
"Burning Mystery" (Brennendes Geheimnis, 1911)
"At dusk"
"Woman and Nature"
"Sunset of One Heart"
"Fantastic Night"
"Street in the Moonlight"
"Summer Novella"
"The Last Holiday"
"Fear"
"Leporella"
"The Irrevocable Moment"
"Stolen Manuscripts"
The Governess (Die Gouvernante, 1911)
"Compulsion"
"The Incident on Lake Geneva"
Byron's Secret
"An unexpected introduction to a new profession"
"Arturo Toscanini"
"Christina" (Rausch der Verwandlung, 1982)
"Clarissa" (not finished)
On February 23, 1942, newspapers around the world came out with a sensational headline on the front page: "The famous Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Charlotte committed suicide in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro." Under the headline was a photograph that looked more like a scene from a Hollywood melodrama: dead spouses in bed. Zweig's face is peaceful and calm. Lotta touchingly put her head on her husband's shoulder and gently squeezes his hand in hers.
At a time when human slaughter was raging in Europe and the Far East, daily claiming hundreds and thousands of lives, this message could not remain a sensation for long. For contemporaries, the writer's act caused rather bewilderment, and for some (for example, Thomas Mann) it was just indignation: "selfish contempt for contemporaries." Suicide of Zweig and after more than half a century looks mysterious. He was counted as one of the shoots of that suicidal harvest that the fascist regime gathered from the fields of German-language literature. Compared with similar and almost simultaneous actions of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, Ernst Weiss, Walter Hasenklever. But there are no similarities here (except, of course, for the fact that all of the above were German-speaking writers - immigrants, and most of them Jews) there is no. Weiss opened his veins when the Nazi troops entered Paris. Hazenklever, who was in the internment camp, poisoned himself, fearing that he would be extradited to the German authorities. Benjamin took poison, fearing to fall into the hands of the Gestapo: the Spanish border, on which he ended up, was blocked. Abandoned by his wife and left penniless, Toller hanged himself in a New York hotel.
Zweig did not have any obvious, ordinary reasons for taking his own life. No creative crisis. No financial hardship. No fatal disease. No problems in personal life. Before the war, Zweig was the most successful German writer. His works were published all over the world, translated into 30 or 40 languages. By the standards of the then writing environment, he was considered a multimillionaire. Of course, since the mid-1930s, the German book market was closed to him, but there were still American publishers. The day before his death, Zweig sent one of them his last two works, neatly reprinted by Lotta: The Chess Novella and the book of memoirs Yesterday's World. Unfinished manuscripts were later found in the writer's desk: a biography of Balzac, an essay on Montaigne, an untitled novel.
Three years earlier, Zweig had married his secretary, Charlotte Altman, who was 27 years his junior and devoted to him to death, literally, not figuratively, as it turned out. Finally, in 1940, he accepted British citizenship - a measure that relieved the emigrant ordeals with documents and visas, vividly described in Remarque's novels. Millions of people, squeezed into the millstones of a giant European meat grinder, could only envy the writer, who settled comfortably in the heavenly town of Petropolis and, together with his young wife, made trips to the famous carnival in Rio. A lethal dose of veronal is usually not taken in such circumstances.
Of course, there were many versions about the reasons for suicide. They talked about the loneliness of the writer in a foreign Brazil, longing for his native Austria, for a cozy house in Salzburg plundered by the Nazis, a famous collection of autographs stolen, about fatigue and depression. Quoted letters to my ex-wife (“I continue my work; but only 1/4 of my strength. It’s just an old habit without any creativity ...”, “I’m tired of everything ...”, “The best times have sunk forever ...”) the writer’s almost manic fear of the fatal figure of 60 years (“I am afraid of illness, old age and addiction”). It is believed that the last straw that overflowed the cup of patience was newspaper reports about the capture of Singapore by the Japanese and the offensive of the Wehrmacht troops in Libya. There were rumors that a German invasion of England was being prepared. Perhaps Zweig feared that the war from which he fled, crossing oceans and continents (England - USA - Brazil - his route of flight), would spill over into the Western Hemisphere. The most famous explanation was given by Remarque: “People who had no roots were extremely unstable - chance played a decisive role in their lives. If on that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could pour out their hearts to someone, even by phone, the misfortune might not have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign land among strangers” (“Shadows in Paradise”).
The heroes of many of Zweig's works ended the same way as their author. Perhaps, before his death, the writer remembered his own essay about Kleist, who committed double suicide with Henrietta Vogel. But Zweig himself was never a suicidal person.
There is a strange logic in the fact that this gesture of despair ended the life of a man who seemed to his contemporaries a darling of fate, a favorite of the gods, a lucky man, born "with a silver spoon in his mouth." “Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Zweig said at the end of his life. The word "maybe" is not very appropriate here. He was lucky always and everywhere. He was lucky with his parents: his father, Moritz Zweig, was a Viennese textile manufacturer, his mother, Ida Brettauer, belonged to the richest family of Jewish bankers, whose members settled all over the world. Wealthy, educated, assimilated Jews. He was lucky to be born a second son: the eldest, Alfred, inherited his father's company, and the youngest was given the opportunity to study at the university in order to receive a university degree and maintain the family reputation with the title of doctor of some sciences.
Lucky with time and place: Vienna at the end of the 19th century, the Austrian "Silver Age": Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler and Rilke in literature; Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern and Alban Berg in music; Klimt and "Secession" in painting; performances of the Burgtheater and the Royal Opera, Freud's psychoanalytic school... The air is saturated with high culture. "The Age of Reliability," as the nostalgic Zweig dubbed it in his dying memoirs.
Good luck with school. True, Zweig hated the “educational barracks” itself - the state gymnasium, but he ended up in a class “infected” with an interest in art: someone wrote poetry, someone painted, someone was going to become an actor, someone studied music and did not miss a single concert, and someone even published articles in magazines. Later, Zweig was also lucky with the university: attending lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy was free, so that classes and exams did not exhaust him. It was possible to travel, live for a long time in Berlin and Paris, meet celebrities.
He was lucky during the First World War: although Zweig was drafted into the army, he was sent only to an easy job in the military archive. At the same time, the writer - a cosmopolitan and a convinced pacifist - could publish anti-war articles and dramas, participate, together with Romain Rolland, in the creation of an international organization of cultural figures who opposed the war. In 1917, the Zurich theater took up the production of his play Jeremiah. This gave Zweig the opportunity to get a vacation and spend the end of the war in prosperous Switzerland.
Good luck with looks. In his youth, Zweig was handsome and very popular with the ladies. A long and passionate romance began with a "letter from a stranger" signed with the mysterious initials FMFV. Friederika Maria von Winternitz was also a writer, the wife of a major official. After the end of the First World War, they got married. Twenty years of cloudless family happiness.
But most of all, of course, Zweig was lucky in literature. He began to write early, at the age of 16 he published his first aesthetic-decadent poems, at 19 he published a collection of poems "Silver Strings" at his own expense. Success came instantly: Rilke himself liked the poems, and the formidable editor of the most reputable Austrian newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl (the future founder of Zionism), took his articles for publication. But the real glory of Zweig was brought by the works written after the war: short stories, "romanized biographies", a collection of historical miniatures "Star Clock of Humanity", biographical essays collected in the "Builders of the World" cycle.
He considered himself a citizen of the world. Traveled all continents, visited Africa, India and both Americas, spoke several languages. Franz Werfel said that Zweig was better prepared than anyone else for life in exile. Zweig's acquaintances and friends included almost all European celebrities: writers, artists, politicians. However, he was defiantly not interested in politics, believing that “in real, in real life, in the field of action of political forces, it is not outstanding minds, not carriers of pure ideas, that are of decisive importance, but a much baser, but also more dexterous breed - behind-the-scenes figures, people of dubious morality and little intelligence," like Joseph Fouche, whose biography he wrote. The apolitical Zweig never even went to the polls.
While still a schoolboy, at the age of 15, Zweig began collecting autographs of writers and composers. Later, this hobby became his passion, he owned one of the best collections of manuscripts in the world, including pages written by the hand of Leonardo, Napoleon, Balzac, Mozart, Bach, Nietzsche, personal belongings of Goethe and Beethoven. There were at least 4,000 directories alone.
All this success and brilliance had, however, a downside. In the writer's environment, they caused jealousy and envy. In the words of John Fowles, "the silver spoon eventually began to turn into a crucifix." Brecht, Musil, Canetti, Hesse, Kraus left frankly hostile remarks about Zweig. Hofmannsthal, one of the organizers of the Salzburg Festival, demanded that Zweig not appear at the festival. The writer bought a house in small, provincial Salzburg during the First World War, long before any festivals, but he kept this agreement and every summer, during the festival, he left the city. Others were not so outspoken. Thomas Mann, who was considered the No. 1 German writer, was not too pleased with the fact that someone overtook him in popularity and sales ratings. And although he wrote about Zweig: “His literary fame penetrated into the remotest corners of the earth. Perhaps, since the time of Erasmus, no writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig, ”Mann called him one of the worst modern German writers in his circle of relatives. True, Mann's bar was not low: Feuchtwanger and Remarque fell into the same company along with Zweig.
"Non-Austrian Austrian, non-Jewish Jew". Zweig really didn't feel like an Austrian or a Jew. He recognized himself as a European and all his life stood up for the creation of a united Europe - an insanely utopian idea in the interwar period, implemented several decades after his death.
Zweig said of himself and his parents that they "were Jews only by chance of birth." Like many prosperous, assimilated Western Jews, he had a slight disdain for the Ostjuden, who came from the Pale of Settlement's poor, traditional way of life and spoke Yiddish. When Herzl tried to recruit Zweig to work in the Zionist movement, he flatly refused. In 1935, when he was in New York, he did not speak out about the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, fearing that this would only worsen their situation. Zweig was condemned for this refusal to use his influence in the fight against rising anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt called him "a bourgeois writer who never cared about the fate of his own people." In fact, everything was more complicated. Asking himself what nationality he would choose in a united Europe of the future, Zweig admitted that he would prefer to be a Jew, a person with a spiritual rather than a physical homeland.
It is hard for the reader of Zweig to believe that he lived until 1942, survived two world wars, several revolutions and the onset of fascism, that he traveled the whole world. It seems that his life stopped somewhere in the 20s, if not earlier, and that he never traveled outside of Central Europe. The action of almost all of his short stories and novels takes place before the war, usually in Vienna, less often in some European resorts. It seems that Zweig in his work tried to escape into the past - into the blessed "golden age of reliability."
History was another way of escaping into the past. Biographies, historical essays and miniatures, reviews and memoirs occupy much more space in Zweig's creative heritage than original works - a couple of dozen short stories and two novels. Zweig's historical interests were not unusual, all German literature of his time was embraced by a "tendency for history" (critic W. Schmidt-Dengler): Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Emil Ludwig ... The era of wars and revolutions required historical understanding. “When such great events in history take place, one does not want to invent in art,” said Zweig.
The peculiarity of Zweig is that for him history was reduced to separate, decisive, crisis moments - "high points", "truly historical, great and unforgettable moments." At such hours, the unknown captain of the engineering troops Rouge de Lisle creates the Marseillaise, the adventurer Vasco Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean, and because of the indecision of Marshal Pear, the fate of Europe is changing. Zweig also celebrated such historical moments in his life. Thus, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for him was symbolized by a meeting on the Swiss border with the train of the last Emperor Charles, who sent him into exile. He also collected celebrity autographs for a reason, but was looking for those manuscripts that would express a moment of inspiration, a creative insight of a genius that would allow “to comprehend in the relic of the manuscript what made immortals immortal for the world.”
Zweig's short stories are also the stories of one "fantastic night", "24 hours from life": a concentrated moment when the hidden possibilities of the individual, dormant abilities and passions break out. The biographies of Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette are stories of how "ordinary, everyday life turns into a tragedy of ancient proportions", the average person turns out to be worthy of greatness. Zweig believed that every person has some kind of innate, "demonic" beginning that drives him beyond his own personality, "to danger, to the unknown, to risk." It was this breakthrough of the dangerous - or sublime - part of our soul that he liked to portray. He called one of his biographical trilogies “Fighting the Demon”: Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, “Dionysian” natures, completely subordinate to the “power of the demon” and opposed by him to the harmonic Olympian Goethe.
Zweig's paradox is the ambiguity to which "literary class" he should be attributed. He considered himself a "serious writer", but it is obvious that his works are rather high-quality popular literature: melodramatic plots, entertaining biographies of celebrities. According to Steven Spender, Zweig's main readership were teenagers from European middle-class families - they eagerly read stories that behind the respectable facade of bourgeois society hide "burning secrets" and passions: sexual desire, fears, manias and madness. Many of Zweig's novels seem to be illustrations of Freud's studies, which is not surprising: they revolved in the same circles, described the same respectable and respectable crowns, hiding a bunch of subconscious complexes under the guise of decency.
With all its brightness and external brilliance, something elusive, obscure is felt in Zweig. He was more of a private person. His writings are by no means autobiographical. “Your things are only a third of your personality,” his first wife wrote to him. In Zweig's memoirs, the reader is struck by their strange impersonalism: it is more a biography of an era than an individual. Not much can be learned about the writer's personal life from them. In Zweig's short stories, the figure of the narrator often appears, but he always keeps in the background, in the background, performing purely auxiliary functions. Oddly enough, the writer gave his own traits to far from the most pleasant of his characters: to the annoying celebrity collector in Impatience of the Heart or the writer in Letter from a Stranger. All this is more like a self-caricature - perhaps unconscious and not even noticed by Zweig himself.
Zweig is generally a writer with a double bottom: if you wish, you can find associations with Kafka in his most classic works - that's who he seemed to have nothing in common with! Meanwhile, "The Sunset of One Heart" - a story about the instantaneous and terrible breakup of a family - is the same "Transformation", only without any phantasmagoria, and the reasoning about the court in "Fear" seems to be borrowed from "The Trial". Critics have long noticed the similarity of the plot lines of the Chess Novella with Nabokov's Luzhin. Well, the famous romantic “Letter from a Stranger” in the era of postmodernism is tempting to read in the spirit of Priestley’s “Inspector’s Visit”: a prank that created a story of great love out of several random women.
The literary fate of Zweig is a mirror version of the romantic legend about an unrecognized artist, whose talent remained unappreciated by his contemporaries and was recognized only after his death. In the case of Zweig, it was exactly the opposite: in the words of Fowles, "Stefan Zweig experienced, after his death in 1942, the most complete oblivion of any other writer of our century." Fowles, of course, exaggerates: even during his lifetime, Zweig was still not “the most widely read and translated serious writer in the world,” and his oblivion is far from absolute. In at least two countries, Zweig's popularity never waned. These countries are France and, oddly enough, Russia. Why Zweig was so loved in the USSR (his collected works in 12 volumes were published in 1928-1932) is a mystery. The liberal and humanist Zweig had nothing in common with the communists and fellow travelers beloved by the Soviet government.
Zweig was one of the first to feel the onset of fascism. By a strange coincidence, from the terrace of the Salzburg house of the writer, located not far from the German border, a view of Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer's favorite residence, opened. In 1934, Zweig left Austria - four years before the Anschluss. The formal pretext was the desire to work in the British archives on the history of Mary Stuart, but in the depths of his soul he guessed that he would not return.
During these years, he writes about loners, idealists, Erasmus and Castellio, who opposed fanaticism and totalitarianism. In Zweig's contemporary reality, such humanists and liberals could do little.
During the years of emigration, an impeccably happy marriage came to an end. Everything changed with the arrival of a secretary, Charlotte Elizabeth Altman. For several years, Zweig rushed about inside the love triangle, not knowing whom to choose: an aging, but still beautiful and elegant wife, or a mistress - a young, but some kind of nondescript, sickly and unhappy girl. The feeling that Zweig felt for Lotte was more pity than attraction: he gave this pity to Anton Hofmiller, the hero of his only completed novel, Impatience of the Heart, written at that time. In 1938, the writer nevertheless received a divorce. Once Friederike left her husband for Zweig, now he himself left her for another - this melodramatic plot could well form the basis of one of his short stories. "Internally" Zweig did not completely part with his ex-wife, he wrote to her that their break was purely external.
Loneliness approached the writer not only in family life. By the beginning of World War II, he was left without spiritual guidance. In Zweig's talent and personality itself, something feminine slips through. The point is not only that the heroines of most of his works are women, that he was probably one of the most subtle experts in female psychology in world literature. This femininity was manifested in the fact that Zweig was in essence more of a follower than a leader: he constantly needed a “teacher” whom he could follow. Before the First World War, such a "teacher" for him was Verharn, whose poems Zweig translated into German and about whom he wrote memoirs; during the war - Romain Rolland, after it - to some extent Freud. Freud died in 1939. Emptiness surrounded the writer from all sides.
Having lost his homeland, Zweig felt like an Austrian for the first time. In the last years of his life, he writes memoirs - another escape into the past, to Austria at the beginning of the century. Another version of the "Habsburg myth" is nostalgia for a vanished empire. A myth born of desperation - as Joseph Roth said, "but you still have to admit that the Habsburgs are better than Hitler ..." Unlike Roth, his close friend, Zweig did not become either a Catholic or a supporter of the imperial dynasty. And yet he created a panegyric full of painful longing for the “golden age of reliability”: “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed to be designed for eternity, and the state is the highest guarantor of this constancy. Everything in this vast empire firmly and unshakably stood in its place, and above everything - the old Kaiser. The nineteenth century, in its liberal idealism, was sincerely convinced that it was on the straight and true path to "the best of all possible worlds."
Clive James in "Cultural Amnesia" called Zweig the epitome of humanism. Franz Werfel said that Zweig's religion was humanistic optimism, a belief in the liberal values of his youth. "The darkening of this spiritual sky was for Zweig a shock that he could not bear." All this is true - it was easier for the writer to die than to come to terms with the collapse of the ideals of his youth. He ends his nostalgic passages on the liberal age of hope and progress with the characteristic phrase: “But even if it was an illusion, it is still wonderful and noble, more human and life-giving than today's ideals. And something in the depths of the soul, despite all the experience and disappointment, prevents you from completely renouncing it. I cannot completely renounce the ideals of my youth, the belief that someday again, in spite of everything, a bright day will come.
Zweig's farewell letter said: “After sixty, special forces are required to start life anew. My strength is exhausted by years of wandering away from my homeland. Besides, I think it's better now, with your head up, to put an end to an existence, the main joy of which was intellectual work, and the highest value - personal freedom. I greet all my friends. May they see the dawn after a long night! And I'm too impatient and leave before them.
