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Stefan Zweig - Austrian writer, famous mainly as the author of short stories and fictional biographies; literary critic. He was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 in the family of a Jewish manufacturer, the owner of a textile manufactory. Zweig did not expand on childhood and adolescence, talking about the typicality of this period of life for representatives of his environment.

Having been educated at the gymnasium, in 1900 Stefan became a student at the University of Vienna, where he studied German and Roman studies at the Faculty of Philology. While still a student, his debut poetry collection Silver Strings was published. The novice writer sent his book to Rilke, under the influence of whose creative manner it was written, and the result of this act was their friendship, interrupted only by the death of the second. In the same years, literary-critical activity also began: Berlin and Viennese magazines published articles by the young Zweig. After graduating from university and receiving his doctorate in 1904, Zweig published a collection of short stories, The Love of Erica Ewald, as well as poetic translations.

1905-1906 open in the life of Zweig a period of active travel. Starting from Paris and London, he subsequently traveled to Spain, Italy, then his travels went beyond the continent, he visited North and South America, India, Indochina. During the First World War, Zweig was an employee of the archives of the Ministry of Defense, had access to documents and, not without the influence of his good friend R. Rolland, turned into a pacifist, wrote anti-war articles, plays, and short stories. He called Rolland himself "the conscience of Europe." In the same years, he created a number of essays, the main characters of which were M. Proust, T. Mann, M. Gorky and others. During 1917-1918. Zweig lived in Switzerland, and in the post-war years, Salzburg became his place of residence.

In the 20-30s. Zweig continues to write actively. During 1920-1928. biographies of famous people are published under the title "Builders of the World" (Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Stendhal, etc.). In parallel, S. Zweig was engaged in short stories, and the works of this particular genre turned him into a popular writer not only in his country and on the continent, but throughout the world. His short stories were built according to his own model, which distinguished Zweig's creative style from other works of this genre. Biographical writings also enjoyed considerable success. This was especially true of the “Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” written in 1934 and “Mary Stuart” published in 1935. In the genre of the novel, the writer tried his hand only twice, because he understood that short stories were his vocation, and attempts to write a large-scale canvas turned out to be a failure. From his pen came out only "Impatience of the Heart" and the remaining unfinished "Freak of Transfiguration", which was published four decades after the death of the author.

The last period of Zweig's life is associated with a constant change of residence. As a Jew, he could not stay in Austria after the Nazis came to power. In 1935, the writer moved to London, but he did not feel completely safe in the capital of Great Britain, so he left the continent and in 1940 ended up in Latin America. In 1941, he temporarily moved to the United States, but then returned to Brazil, where he settled in the small city of Petropolis.

Literary activity continues, Zweig publishes literary criticism, essays, collection of speeches, memoirs, works of art, but his state of mind is very far from calm. In his imagination, he painted a picture of the victory of the Nazi troops and the death of Europe, and this drove the writer into despair, he plunged into a severe depression. Being in another part of the world, he did not have the opportunity to communicate with friends, he experienced an acute feeling of loneliness, although he lived in Petropolis with his wife. On February 22, 1942, Zweig and his wife took a huge dose of sleeping pills and voluntarily passed away.

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Stefan Zweig - Austrian writer, famous mainly as the author of short stories and fictional biographies; literary critic. He was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 in the family of a Jewish manufacturer, the owner of a textile manufactory. Zweig did not expand on childhood and adolescence, talking about the typicality of this period of life for representatives of his environment.

Having been educated at the gymnasium, in 1900 Stefan became a student at the University of Vienna, where he studied German and Roman studies at the Faculty of Philology. While still a student, his debut poetry collection Silver Strings was published. The novice writer sent his book to Rilke, under the influence of whose creative manner it was written, and the result of this act was their friendship, interrupted only by the death of the second. In the same years, literary-critical activity also began: Berlin and Viennese magazines published articles by the young Zweig. After graduating from university and receiving his doctorate in 1904, Zweig published a collection of short stories, The Love of Erica Ewald, as well as poetic translations.

1905-1906 open in the life of Zweig a period of active travel. Starting from Paris and London, he subsequently traveled to Spain, Italy, then his travels went beyond the continent, he visited North and South America, India, Indochina. During the First World War, Zweig was an employee of the archives of the Ministry of Defense, had access to documents and, not without the influence of his good friend R. Rolland, turned into a pacifist, wrote anti-war articles, plays, and short stories. He called Rolland himself "the conscience of Europe." In the same years, he created a number of essays, the main characters of which were M. Proust, T. Mann, M. Gorky and others. During 1917-1918. Zweig lived in Switzerland, and in the post-war years, Salzburg became his place of residence.

In the 20-30s. Zweig continues to write actively. During 1920-1928. biographies of famous people are published under the title "Builders of the World" (Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Stendhal, etc.). In parallel, S. Zweig was engaged in short stories, and the works of this particular genre turned him into a popular writer not only in his country and on the continent, but throughout the world. His short stories were built according to his own model, which distinguished Zweig's creative style from other works of this genre. Biographical writings also enjoyed considerable success. This was especially true for the Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam written in 1934 and Mary Stuart published in 1935. In the genre of the novel, the writer tried his hand only twice, because he understood that short stories were his vocation, and attempts to write a large-scale canvas turned out to be a failure. From his pen came out only "Impatience of the Heart" and the remaining unfinished "Freak of Transfiguration", which was published four decades after the death of the author.

The last period of Zweig's life is associated with a constant change of residence. As a Jew, he could not stay in Austria after the Nazis came to power. In 1935, the writer moved to London, but he did not feel completely safe in the capital of Great Britain, so he left the continent and in 1940 ended up in Latin America. In 1941, he temporarily moved to the United States, but then returned to Brazil, where he settled in the small city of Petropolis.

Literary activity continues, Zweig publishes literary criticism, essays, collection of speeches, memoirs, works of art, but his state of mind is very far from calm. In his imagination, he painted a picture of the victory of the Nazi troops and the death of Europe, and this drove the writer into despair, he plunged into a severe depression. Being in another part of the world, he did not have the opportunity to communicate with friends, he experienced an acute feeling of loneliness, although he lived in Petropolis with his wife. On February 23, 1942, Zweig and his wife took a huge dose of sleeping pills and voluntarily passed away.

© G. Kagan, 2015

© G. Kagan, translation, 1987

© Edition in Russian, design. LLC "Publishing Group "Azbuka-Atticus"", 2015 Publishing house CoLibri®

We will meet such a time

how it will overtake us.

Shakespeare. Cymbeline

I have never attached so much importance to my person that I would be tempted to tell others the story of my life. Much more had to happen—much more than usually falls to a single generation—events, trials, and catastrophes, before I found the courage to start a book in which my self is the protagonist, or rather the focal point. Nothing is more alien to me than the role of a lecturer commenting on transparencies; time itself creates pictures, I just choose words for them, and it will be not so much about my fate, but about the fate of a whole generation, marked by such a difficult fate, as hardly any other in the history of mankind. Each of us, even the most insignificant and imperceptible, is shaken to the very depths of the soul by the almost continuous volcanic shudders of European soil; one of many, I have no other advantage than one: as an Austrian, as a Jew, as a writer, as a humanist and pacifist, I have always found myself exactly where these tremors were felt most strongly. Three times they turned my house and my whole life upside down, tore me from the past and threw me with hurricane force into the void, into the "nowhere" so well known to me. But I'm not complaining: a person deprived of his homeland acquires a different freedom - whoever is not bound by anything can no longer reckon with anything. Thus, I hope to observe at least the main condition for any reliable depiction of the era - sincerity and impartiality, for I am cut off from all roots and even from the very earth that nourished these roots - this is what I am now, which I will not wish anyone else .

I was born in 1881 in a large and powerful empire, in the Habsburg monarchy, but you should not look for it on the map: it has been erased without a trace. He grew up in Vienna, in this two thousand year old supranational capital, and was forced to leave it as a criminal before it degenerated into a German provincial city. My literary work in the language in which I wrote it has been reduced to ashes in the very country where millions of readers have made my books their friends. Thus, I no longer belong to anyone, I am a stranger everywhere, at best a guest; and my great homeland - Europe - has been lost to me since the second time it was torn apart by a fratricidal war. Against my will, I witnessed a horrific defeat of the mind and the wildest triumph of cruelty in history; never before - I note this not with pride, but with shame - no generation has suffered such a moral fall from such a spiritual height as ours. In the short period of time when my beard broke through and turned gray, during these half a century, more significant transformations and changes took place than usual in ten human lives, and each of us feels this - an incredible amount!

My Today is so different from any of my Yesterdays, my ups from my downs, that sometimes it seems to me that I have lived not one, but several completely different lives. So every time I inadvertently drop “My life”, I involuntarily ask myself: “What life? The one that was before the First World War, or the one that was before the Second, or the present? And then again I find myself saying: “My home” - and I don’t know which of the former I mean: in Bath, in Salzburg, or my parents’ house in Vienna. Or I say: "With us" - and I remember with fright that for a long time I have belonged as little to the citizens of my country as to the British or Americans; there I am a cut piece, and here I am a foreign body; the world in which I grew up, and the world of today, and the world that exists between them, separate in my mind; they are completely different worlds. Whenever I tell young people about the events before the first war, I notice from their bewildered questions that much of what still exists for me looks like distant history or something implausible to them. But in the depths of my soul I have to admit: between our present and past, recent and distant, all bridges have been destroyed. Yes, I myself cannot but be amazed at everything that we happened to experience within the limits of one human life - even such a maximally unsettled one and facing the threat of destruction - especially when I compare it with the life of my ancestors. My father, my grandfather - what did they see? Each of them lived his life monotonously and monotonously. All, from beginning to end, without ups and downs, without upheavals and threats, life with insignificant disturbances and imperceptible changes; in the same rhythm, measuredly and calmly, the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave. They lived in the same country, in the same city, and even almost constantly in the same house; the events taking place in the world, in fact, happened only in the newspapers, they did not knock on the door. True, somewhere in those days there was some kind of war going on, but it was, on the current scale, more like a war, and it was played out far, far away, guns were not heard, and after six months it faded away, was forgotten, a fallen leaf history, and the same life began again. For us, there was no return, nothing remained of the former, nothing returned; we have had such a fate: to drink a full cup of what history usually lets go down the throat of this or that country in this or that period. In any case, one generation experienced a revolution, another a coup, a third a war, a fourth a famine, a fifth an inflation, and some blessed countries, blessed generations, did not know any of this at all. But we, who are sixty years old today and who, perhaps, are destined to live a little longer - what we have not seen, suffered, what we have not experienced! We've flipped through the catalog of every conceivable catastrophe from cover to cover - and still haven't reached the last page. I alone was an eyewitness to the two greatest wars of mankind and met each of them on different fronts: one on the German, the other on the anti-German. Before the war, I experienced the highest degree of individual freedom and then the lowest in several hundred years; I was praised and branded, I was free and bonded, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the Apocalypse swept through my life - revolution and famine, inflation and terror, epidemics and emigration; before my eyes, such mass ideologies as fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all this deadly plague, nationalism, which ruined the flowering of our European culture, grew and spread their influence. I found myself defenseless, powerless witness to the incredible fall of mankind in the seemingly long forgotten times of barbarism with its deliberate and programmed doctrine of anti-humanism. We have been granted the right - for the first time in centuries - to see again wars without a declaration of war, concentration camps, torture, mass looting and bombardment of defenseless cities - all these atrocities that have not been known for the last fifty generations, and future ones, I would like to believe, will no longer tolerate. But, paradoxically, I saw that at the same time when our world was morally thrown back a millennium ago, mankind achieved incredible successes in technology and science, surpassing in one fell swoop everything achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the sky, the instantaneous the transmission of the human word to the other end of the earth and thereby overcoming space, the splitting of the atom, the victory over the most insidious diseases, which yesterday could only be dreamed of. Never before has mankind manifested its diabolical and god-like essence so strongly.

Stefan Zweig (German Stefan Zweig - Stefan Zweig; November 28, 1881 - February 23, 1942) - Austrian critic, author of many short stories and fictionalized biographies.

Short story writer, novelist, poet, author of literary biographies. Born in Vienna in the family of a wealthy Jewish merchant who owned a textile manufactory. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he went to London, Paris, traveled to Italy and Spain, visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama.

The solid state of the parents makes it possible to easily publish the first book - "Silver Strings" (1901). Zweig ventured to send the first collection of poems to his idol, the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He sent back his book. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Rilke's death.

Zweig's short stories - "Amok", "Confusion of feelings", "Chess novel" - made the author's name popular all over the world. They amaze with drama, captivate with unusual plots and make you think about the vicissitudes of human destinies. Zweig's novels of modern life generally failed. He understood this and rarely addressed the genre of the novel. These are "Impatience of the Heart" and "Fever of Transfiguration", printed in German for the first time forty years after the death of the author, in 1982.

Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Joseph Fouche, Balzac, Marie Antoinette. The writer has always masterfully worked with documents, discovering psychological background in any letter or memoir of an eyewitness. These include the following works "Three singers of their lives" (Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy), "Fight with the demon" (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche).

In the 20-30s. many Western writers have a growing interest in the USSR. They saw in this country the only real force that could resist fascism. Zweig came to the USSR in 1928 for the celebrations on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Leo Tolstoy. His attitude towards the Land of the Soviets could then be characterized as benevolently critical curiosity. But over the years, goodwill waned, and skepticism grew.

The last years of Zweig's life - the years of wandering He flees from Salzburg, choosing London as a temporary residence. Then he went to Latin America (1940), moved to the USA, but soon decided to settle in the small Brazilian city of Petropolis, located high in the mountains.

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 that reflects 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.