Zatonsky D.
Stefan Zweig, or the Atypically Typical Austrian
Zatonsky D. Artistic landmarks of the 20th century
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When an unusual uproar arose around his novel The Death of Virgil (1945), Hermann Broch said, not without a bit of proud self-irony: “I am close to asking myself whether this book was not written by Stefan Zweig after all.”
Broch was a typical Austrian writer, that is, one of those who did not know success during his lifetime. So typical that somehow he didn’t even strive for success, at least he didn’t think about high earnings. However, there were Austrians who were even more typical - Kafka, Musil. The first did not value his own writings to such an extent that he bequeathed them to be burned; the second was so in no hurry to publish his novel “The Man Without Qualities” that at one time he eked out a semi-beggarly existence, and at the dawn of his posthumous renaissance he was called “the least famous of the great writers of our century.”
As for Stefan Zweig, in this sense he was not a typical Austrian. “His literary fame,” wrote Thomas Mann, “penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth. An amazing case considering the small popularity that German authors enjoy in comparison with French and English ones. Perhaps since the time of Erasmus (which he spoke about with such brilliance) no writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig.” If this is an exaggeration, it is understandable and forgivable: after all, at the end of the 20s of our century, no one’s books were translated into all kinds of languages, even the most exotic, more often and more willingly than Zweig’s books.
For Thomas Mann, he is a “German author”, and still the most famous, although Thomas Mann himself, and his brother Heinrich, and Leonhard Frank, and Fallada, and Feuchtwanger, and Remarque lived and wrote at the same time. If you take Zweig as an Austrian, then you simply will not find competitors for him. No one else remembered the other Austrian writers—neither Schnitzler, nor Hofmannsthal, nor Hermann Bahr. True, Rilke remained, but only as a complex poet, for a narrow circle. True, Josef Roth flashed by in the early to mid-30s with his Job, with his Crypt of the Capuchins, with his Radetzky March, but only for a moment, like a comet, and immediately disappeared into literary oblivion for a long time. . And Zweig, back in 1966, was considered one of the two most widely read Austrians on earth; “in a strange, grotesque way, along with Kafka,” as the critic R. Heger maliciously clarifies.
Truly Zweig - this atypical Austrian - turned out to be the plenipotentiary representative of the art of his country. And so it was between the two world wars, not only in Western Europe or America, but also here. When one said: “Austrian literature,” another immediately thought of the name of the author “Amoka” or “Mary Stuart.” And it is not surprising: from 1928 to 1932, the Vremya publishing house published twelve volumes of his books, and the preface to this almost complete collection at that time was written by Gorky himself.
But today a lot has changed. Now the luminaries of Austrian literature of our century, its universally recognized classics, are Kafka, Musil, Broch, Roth, Jaimito von Doderer. All of them (even Kafka) are far from being as widely read as Zweig was once read, but they are all the more highly revered because they are, in fact, large, significant artists, artists who have stood the test of time, moreover, returned to them from oblivion .
But Zweig seemed unable to stand the test. At least, from the highest rung of the hierarchical ladder he descended to a much more modest place. And a suspicion arises that he did not stand on the pedestal rightfully, if at all he did not usurp the literary crown. Broch's proud self-irony and, even more so, R. Heger's schadenfreude clearly indicate this. Something like an anti-legend is emerging, according to which Zweig was simply a whim of fashion, a darling of chance, a seeker of success...
This image of him, however, does not fit well with the assessment given to him by Thomas Mann, and the respect that Gorky had for him, who wrote to N.P. Rozhdestvenskaya in 1926: “Zweig is a wonderful artist and a very talented thinker.” E. Verhaeren, and R. Rolland, and R. Martin du Gard, and J. Romain, and J. Duhamel, who themselves played an outstanding role in the history of modern literature, judged him in approximately the same way. Naturally, the attitude towards the contribution of one or another writer is changeable. And not just because tastes change, that each era has its own idols. This variability also has its own pattern, its own objectivity: what is lighter in spring is washed away and eroded, what is more massive remains. But isn't everything so changeable? It can’t be that someone who seems “wonderful”, “talented”, but turns out to be a soap bubble? And then, about only popular writers, the majority knows from the very beginning that they are caliphs for an hour, and about significant writers - that they are always doomed to misunderstanding on the part of their contemporaries. But can't significance coincide with popularity? After all, enjoying literary success was shameful only in the eyes of “typical Austrians”! And one more thing: did Zweig descend to a more modest place or did others rise to a higher place? If the latter is true, then he simply remained where he was, and the “regrouping” that took place does not humiliate him as an artist.
To answer such questions is to outline Zweig's current situation. Moreover, this means getting closer to understanding the Zweig phenomenon as a whole, because everything had a hand in it - the Austrian homeland, and the frivolous rejection of it, and Europeanism, and the success that usually accrues to theatrical prima donnas, and the general tragedy that turned into a tragedy personal, and the mythization of the lost homeland, and the violent finale...
“Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Stefan Zweig admitted at the end of his life. And it is true. For many years he was fabulously lucky, almost always personally. He was born into a wealthy family and did not know any hardships. Thanks to his early revealed literary talent, his life path was determined as if by itself. But luck also played an important role. Editors and publishers were always at hand, ready to print even his very first, immature works. The poetry collection “Silver Strings” (1901) was praised by Rilke himself, and Richard Strauss himself asked permission to set six poems from this collection to music. Probably Zweig's real merit was not in that; it just happened that way.
Zweig's early works were chamber, slightly aesthetic, covered in decadent sadness. And at the same time, they are marked by a not very clear sense of impending change, characteristic of all European art at the turn of the century. In a word, these were just the kind of things that could have appealed to the Vienna of that time, its liberal circles, the editors of leading literary magazines, or the Young Vienna group, led by the champion of Russian impressionism, Hermann Bahr. There they did not want to know anything about the powerful social changes that Musil, Rilke, Kafka, Broch had already foreseen, about the imminent collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, as if symbolizing all future catastrophes of the bourgeois world; however, there they willingly exposed their faces to the gusts of the new, spring wind, which, so it seemed, only inflated the sails of poetry.
They rushed towards the relatively short-lived, rather local, but amazingly loud fame of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a “child prodigy” who became famous while still at the gymnasium. Young Zweig (so far on a much more modest scale) repeated his path ...
Luck, success, luck affect people in different ways. They make many narcissistic, frivolous, superficial, selfish, and for some, superimposed on internal positive character traits, they inspire, first of all, unshakable everyday optimism, which is by no means devoid of self-criticism. Zweig belonged to these latter. For many years it seemed to him that the surrounding reality, if not good and fair today, was capable of becoming good and fair tomorrow, and was even already finding its way to this. He believed in the ultimate harmony of his world. “It was,” another Austrian writer, F. Werfel, wrote many years later, after his suicide, “a world of liberal optimism, which with superstitious naivety believed in the self-sufficient value of man, and in essence, in the self-sufficient value of the tiny educated layer of the bourgeoisie, in his sacred rights, in the eternity of his existence, in his straightforward progress. The established order of things seemed to him protected and protected by a system of a thousand precautions. This humanistic optimism was the religion of Stefan Zweig... He knew the abysses of life, he approached them as an artist and psychologist. But above him shone the cloudless sky of his youth, which he worshiped, the sky of literature, art, the only sky that liberal optimism valued and knew. Obviously, the darkening of this spiritual sky was a blow for Zweig that he could not bear...” 1
But that was still a long way off. Zweig not only suffered the first blow (I mean the world war of 1914 - 1918): a surge of hatred, cruelty, blind nationalism, which, according to his ideas, that war was primarily, caused active opposition in him. It is known that the writers who rejected the war from the very beginning, who fought against it from the very beginning, can be counted on one hand. And E. Verharn, and T. Mann, and B. Kellerman, and many others believed in the official myth about the “Teutonic” or, accordingly, “Gallic” guilt for it. Together with R. Rolland and L. Frank, Zweig was among the few who did not believe.
He did not end up in the trenches: they put him in a uniform, but left him in Vienna and assigned him to one of the offices of the military department. And this gave him some opportunities. He corresponded with his like-minded friend Rolland, tried to reason with his fellow writers in both warring camps, and managed to publish a review of Barbusse’s novel “Fire” in the Neue Freie Press newspaper, in which he highly praised its anti-war pathos and artistic merits. Not too much, but not so little for those times. And in 1917, Zweig published the drama Jeremiah. It was performed in Switzerland before the end of the war, and Rolland described it as the best “of modern works, where majestic sadness helps the artist to see through the bloody drama of today the eternal tragedy of humanity.” The prophet Jeremiah exhorts the king and the people not to join Egypt in the war against the Chaldeans and predicts the destruction of Jerusalem. The Old Testament plot here is not only a way, under conditions of strict censorship, to convey to the reader current anti-militarist content. Jeremiah (if you don’t count the still rather inexpressive Thersites in the 1907 play of the same name) is the first of a long series of heroes who perform their moral feat alone in Zweig. And not at all out of contempt for the crowd. He cares about the people's welfare, but he was ahead of his time and therefore remains misunderstood. However, he is ready to go into Babylonian captivity along with his fellow tribesmen.
Rolland for Zweig is from the same series of heroes. In 1921, Zweig wrote a book about Rolland, where he praised the author of “Jean-Christophe”, however, with all his admiration for this book, he even more glorified the man who fearlessly raised his voice against the war. And not in vain, because “the powerful forces that destroy cities and destroy states still remain helpless against one person, if he has enough will and spiritual fearlessness to remain free, for those who imagined themselves victorious over millions could not subjugate one thing for oneself - a free conscience” 2. From a political point of view, there is a lot of utopianness in this maxim, but as a moral maxim it deserves respect.
“For him,” L. Mitrokhin writes about Zweig, “the development of society was determined by a certain “spirit of history,” the inherent desire for freedom and humanism in humanity.” 3. L. Mitrokhin’s judgment is fair, with the only clarification that, according to Zweig, the desire this is not given in advance, much less is it realized by itself, by virtue of some spontaneous laws. It is an ideal, upon the achievement of which the aggregate of people has yet to transform into a single humanity. That is why today the contribution is so important, the inspiring example of an individual, his selfless resistance to everything that slows down and distorts progress, is so invaluable. In a word, Zweig is most interested in the historical process in what we now call the “human factor.” This is a certain weakness, a certain one-sidedness of his concept; This, however, is its certain moral strength. After all, Zweig’s pioneers, Zweig’s creators of history are “the greats of this world” by no means in the textbook interpretation. Even if they sometimes turn out to be crowned, they still attract Zweig not for this, but for some extraordinary human side.
Among the historical miniatures in the book “Humanity's Finest Hours” (1927) there is one that is especially indicative for Zweig. It is called “The First Word from Overseas” and tells about the laying of a telegraph cable between America and Europe. By the time Zweig wrote about it, this technical achievement of the mid-19th century had long been crowded out of the memory of contemporaries by others of a larger scale. But Zweig has his own approach to it, his own aspect of considering it. “We need to take the last step,” he explains the imperishable meaning of the project, “and all parts of the world will be involved in a grandiose global union, united by a single human consciousness.” And regarding the earlier more modest project, as a result of which the telegraph cable lay at the bottom of the English Channel, he adds: “So, England was annexed to the mainland, and from that moment on, Europe for the first time became real Europe, a single organism...”
From his youth, Zweig dreamed of the unity of the world, the unity of Europe - not state, not political, but cultural, bringing together and enriching nations and peoples. And not least, it was this dream that led him to a passionate and active denial of the world war as a violation of the human community, which had already begun (so it seemed to him) to take shape during the forty peaceful European years.
It is said about the central character of Zweig’s “Summer Novella” that he “in a high sense did not know his homeland, just as all the beautiful knights and pirates who rush through the cities of the world do not know it, greedily absorbing everything beautiful that they meet along the way.” It was said with that excessive pomp that was characteristic of pre-war Zweig, and not without the influence (at that time, probably not yet realized) of the realities of the Habsburg monarchy, which was an almost Babylonian pandemonium of peoples. Nevertheless, Zweig never sinned with sympathy for cosmopolitanism. In 1926, he wrote an article “Cosmopolitanism or Internationalism,” where he decisively took the side of the latter.
But let’s return to “The First Word from Overseas.” “... Unfortunately,” we read there, “they still consider it more important to talk about wars and victories of individual commanders or states instead of talking about the general - the only true - victories of mankind.” However, for Zweig, the victory of humanity is always the victory of the individual. In this case, the American Cyrus Field, not an engineer, not a technocrat, just a wealthy enthusiast who was willing to risk his fortune. It does not matter whether Field was such a guardian of public interests, it is important that he was so in the eyes of Zweig.
As soon as the role of the individual is great, the weight of “chance, this mother of so many glorious exploits...” also increases. When the cable is laid, Field is celebrated as a national hero; when it turns out that the connection has been interrupted, he is vilified as a fraud.
Chance also rules the roost in other miniatures from Humanity's Finest Hours. “And suddenly one tragic episode, one of those mysterious moments that sometimes arise during the inscrutable decisions of history, as if with one blow, determines the fate of Byzantium.” Out of forgetfulness, an inconspicuous gate in the city wall is left open, and the Janissaries burst into the city. Well, if the gate had been locked, would the Eastern Roman Empire, of which only the capital remained, have survived? “Grushy thinks for one second, and that second decides his fate, the fate of Napoleon and the whole world. It predetermines, this single second on the farm in Waldheim, the entire course of the 19th century...” Well, what if Marshal Grouchy had thought differently and joined the main forces of his emperor (and even, perhaps, before Blucher’s Prussians joined the troops Wellington) and the Battle of Waterloo Sylla would have been won by the French, so would the Bonapartes have ruled the world?
It is unlikely that Zweig imagined something like this. If only because he was a fan of Leo Tolstoy and knew well his deterministic view of history: Tolstoy mocked in War and Peace those who believed that Napoleon did not win the Battle of Borodino due to a severe runny nose. Zweig simply followed his own literary logic. And not only in the sense that he needed to somehow sharpen his non-fictional plot. Even more significant is that since he brought the individual to the forefront, she should have been given more freedom of action, internal and external freedom. And the game of chance served as one of the bearers of this freedom, because it gave the hero a chance to fully reveal his steadfastness, his perseverance. In "The First Word from Across the Ocean" this is very clear: despite all the trials, "Cyrus Field's faith and perseverance are unshakable."
The same can be said about Zweig's prophet Jeremiah and Romain Rolland as Zweig's hero. Their nature is resilience, their destiny is loneliness; destiny, contrast highlighting the nature.
This contrast permeates the short poem “Monument to Karl Liebknecht,” written by Zweig, probably shortly after Liebknecht’s assassination in 1919 and first published in 1924:
Like no one ever
I was not alone in this world storm, -
Alone he raised his head
Over seventy million helmeted skulls.
And shouted
Seeing how darkness covers the universe,
Shout to the seven skies of Europe
With their deafened, with their dead god,
He shouted the great, red word: “No!”
(Translation by A. Efros)
Liebknecht was not “alone”; behind him stood the left social democracy, and, since 1918, the communist party, which he founded together with Rosa Luxemburg. Zweig does not exactly ignore this historical fact. He only takes his hero in special moments that are so key to his own worldview: perhaps when he - really alone - stands on the rostrum of the Reichstag and throws his “no” to war in the face of a hall heated with chauvinist hatred; or maybe a second before death, for everyone, even the tribune of the people, dies alone...
And Liebknecht, artificially isolated from the mass of like-minded people, thinking only about it, about the masses, shouts out “the great, red word.” Even those Zweigian heroes who actually found themselves alone are not opposed to society. On the contrary, they are social in their own way.
Zweig's novella does not seem to agree with this. Her characters are not occupied with the world, humanity, progress, but only with themselves or those people with whom private life brings them together, its crossroads, incidents, passions. In “The Burning Secret” we have before us a child who for the first time encounters the alien, selfish world of adults. In the "Summer Novella" he is an elderly man who writes mystifying letters to a young girl and unexpectedly falls in love with her. In “Fear”, this is a woman who started a boring affair, which turns into blackmail and horror for her, but ends in reconciliation with her husband. In “Amoka” there is an unsociable doctor who is approached by a patient, a beautiful colonial lady, endowed with will and pride; he misunderstood his role and his duty, so it all ends in her death and his atoning suicide. In “A Fantastic Night” there is a certain baron-flaneur who, because of his own stupid joke, suddenly begins to see the world differently, looks into its languid depths and becomes different himself. In "The Sunset of One Heart" - an old businessman who found his daughter leaving his neighbor's room in the morning; Formerly a slave to the family, he loses his taste for making money, even his taste for life. In "Leporella" - an ugly maid, so devoted to her frivolous master that she poisoned her mistress and threw herself from the bridge when the frightened widower left her place.
Zweig's short stories captivate readers to this day, especially such first-class ones as “Letter from a Stranger” or “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.” Amok is often referred to as one of them. But Gorky "Amok" "didn't really like it." He didn’t specify why, but it’s not hard to guess: there’s too much exoticism, and quite a stereotyped one at that - the mysterious “ma’am-sahib”, the dark-skinned boy servant who idolizes her... Even before the war, when Zweig realized that his earliest things were worth little , he left writing for a while and decided to see the world (fortunately, the financial situation allowed this). He traveled around Europe, started in America, in Asia, and sailed to the Far East. Traveling benefited his literary work: without them, probably, neither “Humanity’s Finest Hours,” nor “Magellan” (1937), nor “Amerigo” (1942) would have been born, and indeed the idea of a single humanity, perhaps , would be embodied in other forms. But “Amok” (at least in terms of color and background) is, as it were, a “cost” of that Far Eastern journey. Although in all other respects this novella is purely Zweigian.
Zweig is a master of the small genre. The novels did not work out for him. Neither “Impatience of the Heart” (1938), nor the unfinished one that was published only in 1982 under the title “Dope of Transfiguration” (we translated as “Christina Hoflener”). But his short stories are perfect in their own way, classic in their traditional purity, in their fidelity to the original rule, and at the same time they bear the stamp of the 20th century. Each of them has a clear beginning and an equally clear end. The basis of the plot is one event, interesting, exciting, often out of the ordinary - as in “Fear”, in “Amoka”, in “Fantastic Night”. It directs and organizes the entire course of action. Here everything is coordinated with each other, everything fits together well and functions perfectly. But Zweig does not lose sight of the individual mise-en-scenes of his little performance. They are polished with all possible care. It happens that they acquire tangibility, visibility and are completely amazing, in principle accessible only to cinema. This is how you see in “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman” the hands of those playing roulette - “many hands, bright, mobile, wary hands, as if from holes, peeking out from the sleeves...”. It was not for nothing that this Zweig novella (as well as others) was filmed, and people flocked to watch the hands of the incomparable silent film character actor Conrad Veidt crawling across the cloth of the table.
However, unlike the old short story - not only as it was in Boccaccio, but also in Kleist and K. F. Mayer - in Zweig’s short story we most often deal not with an external, adventurous event, but say, with an “adventure of the soul.” Or, perhaps more precisely, with the transformation of an adventure into such an inner adventure. In the same “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” what is important is not so much the fate of the young Pole, a fanatical gambler, forever poisoned by the air of Monte Carlo, but the reflection of this and her own fate in the story of Mrs. K., now an elderly Englishwoman “with snow-white hair” . She analyzes his passion for roulette and her passion for him, ready to trample all norms and decency - for this lost sheep, for this completely lost man - from the distance of many years that have passed. But not coldly, not detachedly, but with wise, slightly sad understanding. And this removes the too sharp corners of that old, strange story. Almost all of Zweig's best short stories - "At Twilight", and "The Summer Novella", and "Woman and Nature", and "Fantastic Night", and "Street in the Moonlight" - are either first-person narration, or, even more often, , a story within a story, which in itself brings them closer to the type of Chekhov's story - compositionally less strict than a classic short story, softer in plot, but rich psychologically, based on the nuances of feelings, on their inconspicuous mutual transitions.
Of course, Zweig is by no means Chekhov. And not only in terms of writer's rank; he is also entirely in the Western European tradition. And yet Gorky, who did not write short stories at all, but wrote precisely Russian stories, especially liked “Letter from a Stranger”, liked “the stunningly sincere tone... the inhuman tenderness of the attitude towards a woman, the originality of the theme and the magical power of the image that is characteristic only of a true artist." “Letter from a Stranger” is truly Zweig’s masterpiece. Here the intonation for the loving and therefore infinitely indulgent heroine is found with unusual precision, the intonation with which she tells the “famous fiction writer R.” the story of their amazing relationship unknown to him. “You did not recognize me either then or after; you never recognized me,” she writes to him, who spent the night with her twice.
In our literary criticism, this persistent misrecognition was interpreted in the sense that people of bourgeois society are irreparably divided. In the "Letter of a Stranger" this idea is present. But it is not decisive. I don’t want to say that the short story is asocial, but it really is devoid of direct social criticism (like almost all of Zweig’s short stories).
Things like “Fear” both have a Viennese atmosphere and even thematically resemble the short stories of L. Schnitzler. But what did Schnitzler make from similar material? In the short story “The Dead Are Silent,” he depicts a woman who abandons her lover, killed (or perhaps only seriously wounded) by an overturned carriage, so that her adultery is not revealed and her well-being in life is not overturned. Schnitzler is a critic of Austrian superficial hedonism, bourgeois selfishness and callousness. And in his short stories there are practically no positive characters. And in Zweig’s short stories there are practically no negative characters. Including in "Fear". Even the blackmailer turned out to be not a blackmailer, but a simple actress without an engagement, who was hired by the heroine’s husband to scare her and return her to the bosom of the family. But a husband who behaved no more decently than his wife is not condemned. The spouses, as already mentioned, are reconciled.
Zweig is far from idyllic. “He knew the abysses of life...” - Werfel spoke mainly about short stories. There are many deaths, even more tragedies, sinners, troubled and lost souls. But there are no villains - neither gigantic, nor even insignificant, small ones.
Writer's passions (like human passions in general) are not always amenable to unambiguous interpretation. And it is not so easy to directly answer the question of why for Zweig even the poisoner maid from Leporella is not a scoundrel. In any case, not due to any tired relativism: after all, Zweig is rather an idealist.
True, the narrator in the frame of the short story “Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman” (that is, as if the author himself) says: “... I refuse to judge or condemn.” But this is said for a very specific reason. The manufacturer's wife ran away with a passing acquaintance, and the entire boarding house blasphemes her. And the narrator convinces Mrs. K., who, as it soon becomes clear, does not need this at all, “that only the fear of our own desires, of the demonic principle in us, forces us to deny the obvious fact that at other times of her life a woman, being in the power of mysterious strength, loses free will and prudence... and that... a woman who freely and passionately surrenders to her desire acts much more honestly, instead of deceiving her husband in his own arms with her eyes closed.” Sigmund Freud is clearly visible here with his criticism of the suppression of sexual instincts, a Freud whom Zweig highly valued. And yet, it seems, it is not Freudianism, but something else that guides the psychological analysis of Zweig the short story writer.
His characters are often possessed by passion - the somnambulant person from “Woman and Nature”, and both the protagonists of “Amoka”, and the baron in “A Fantastic Night”, and the heroine of “Letter from a Stranger”, and Mrs. K. in “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” " In the neo-romantic times of “Young Vienna”, especially during the expressionist era, this was unheard of. But in the post-war years, the top gradually adopted the sober and dry style of the “new efficiency”. Zweig's novella does not change in principle. His hand becomes firmer, his eye becomes sharper, but his images and feelings - for all the grace of his writing - are still exaggerated. And this, it seems to me, is not just a matter of taste.
Zweig takes the individual. Only here, in the short stories - unlike “Jeremiah”, “Romain Rolland”, “Monument to Karl Liebknecht”, “Humanity’s Finest Hours” - not in the social sphere, not in the face of history, but, as already mentioned, in private life . But this private life, in fact, interests Zweig only from the point of view of “man’s victories over reality.” The words spoken by Gorky in relation to Zweig’s book about Rolland can also be applied to Zweig’s short stories. This fits them into the general context of the writer’s quest.
In the people inhabiting his short stories, Zweig is attracted by the living principle, everything that resists established norms in them, everything that breaks the legalized rules rises above the ordinary. That’s why he likes even the petty pickpocket described in “An Unexpected Acquaintance with a New Profession.” But even sweeter, of course, is the heroine of “Letters from a Stranger,” free in her feelings, moral in her falls, for they were committed in the name of love.
There are, however, in Zweig's short stories also characters who have stepped over the invisible line of morality. Why are they not convicted? Well, the doctor in Amok passed his own sentence and carried it out himself; The author seems to have nothing to do here. Well, what about the baron from “Fantastic Night”, who plunged into the mud and seemed to be cleansed by the mud, and the maid in “Leporella”? After all, she drowned herself not because she was persecuted by the Erinnyes, but because her adored owner kicked her out.
There is a certain defect here. But not so much Zweig’s beliefs in general, but the aspect chosen by the writer, to some extent artistic. An individual, if his victories over reality are in no way correlated with their social results, eludes evaluation according to the laws of high morality. After all, such morality is ultimately always social.
Zweig wrote short stories throughout his life (it seems that his last, anti-fascist in spirit, “The Chess Short Story,” was published by him in 1941); they contributed to his glory. And yet the two volumes in which they were collected are drowned in the mass of his legacy. Was it because at some moment he himself felt the defect? In any case, “novelized biographies”, literary portraits of writers, essays and generally non-purely artistic genres over the years became something defining in his work. Apparently, they are best suited for expressing Zweig's ideas.
There is an opinion that Zweig “became the recognized founder of artistic biographies, now so popular thanks to the books of Y. Tynyanov, A. Maurois, A. Vinogradov, V. Yang, Irving Stone and others.”4. This opinion is not entirely fair and not entirely accurate. Even if we are extremely strict in defining the genre and do not allow, say, Stendhal with his “Life of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio” or “Life of Rossini” into the line of writers, then for Rolland - the author of “heroic biographies” of Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy - there must certainly be a place in this series. And, looking at the chronology, it’s at the very top.
Another thing is that these “heroic biographies” are not the easiest reading and are not very widespread today, and a number were built from popular works. But here’s the strange thing: Zweig’s successful “novelized biographies” are closer to Rolland’s biographies than to some of the books of Maurois or Stone. Zweig himself composed a “heroic biography” - this is his book about Rolland. And, like Rolland, he did not frame his life stories as something completely artistic, did not turn them into true novels. But this was often done by those whose ancestor he is considered to be. I don't mean to say that their choice is worse; they just chose something else. In addition, Maurois or Stone were “biographers,” one might say professional, but Zweig was not. Of course, they themselves looked for heroes to their liking. For Zweig, the determining factor here was not only (perhaps not so much) taste, but primarily the general idea that flowed from his view of history, his approach to it.
In the 20s and 30s, German-language literature was, in the words of the modern researcher W. Schmidt-Dengler, overwhelmed by a “thirst for history” 5. This was facilitated by military defeat, revolutions, and the collapse of both empires - the Habsburg and Hohenzollern: “The more clearly,” explained critic G. Kieser, “the era feels its dependence on the general course of history (and this feeling is always intensified under the influence of destructive rather than creative forces), the more urgent is the interest in historical figures and events” 6.
In particular, the genre of artistic biography flourished. In the collective work “Austrian Literature of the Thirties” 7 a special section is dedicated to him, where dozens of names and titles are collected. So Zweig's books of this genre had a very broad background. True, Zweig stood out in it. And above all, by the fact that his artistic biographies are not limited to the boundaries of the interwar twenty years - neither chronologically nor in terms of success with the reader. “Verlaine” was written back in 1905, “Balzac” - in 1909, “Verhaerne” - in 1910. These were not Zweig's best works, and today they are almost forgotten. But Zweig’s biographies of the 20s and 30s have not been forgotten. However, their background at that time was almost completely washed away by time. There is no doubt, for the most part it was made up of secondary authors and books, and even those that arose from “soil-based”, pro-Nazi tendencies. There were, however, exceptions. For example, the famous Emil Ludwig, who was in no way inferior to Zweig in fame. He wrote about Goethe, Balzac and Demel, about Beethoven and Weber, about Napoleon, Lincoln, Bismarck, Simon Bolivar, Wilhelm II, Hindenburg and Roosevelt; he did not even ignore Jesus Christ. However, today no one except a narrow circle of specialists remembers either his books or his sensational interviews with the most prominent political figures of the era.
There is hardly a clear answer to the question of why this happened. Ludwig dealt very freely with facts from the lives of his heroes (but Zweig was not always impeccable in this sense); Ludwig was inclined to exaggerate their role in the historical process (but Zweig also sometimes sinned with this). It seems that the reason is rather that Ludwig was too dependent on the passing trends of the times, on the influence of its destructive forces, and rushed from one extreme to another. It may seem accidental and unimportant that, being the same age as Zweig, he only wrote a play about Napoleon (1906) and a biography of the poet Richard Demel (1913) before the First World War, and all his other biographical books - including a book about Napoleon - when literature was gripped by the post-war “craving for history”, conditioned by all the German disasters. Ludwig was raised by this wave without having his own, any definite concept of human existence. And Zweig, as we already know, possessed it.
The wave lifted him too, threw him on the literary Olympus. And Salzburg, in which he then settled, turned out to be not only the city of Mozart, but in some way also the city of Stefan Zweig: there and now they will willingly show you a small castle on the slope of a wooded mountain where he lived, and tell you how he is here - in between between triumphant readings in New York or Buenos Aires, he walked with his red Irish setter.
Yes, the wave lifted him too, but did not overwhelm him: the German disasters did not obscure his horizon, because they did not determine his view of the fate of society and the individual, they only sharpened this view. Zweig continued to profess historical optimism. And if the social situation as a whole did not inspire immediate hope in him (he accepted the October Revolution, but as a solution to Russian, not European problems), then this all the more shifted the center of gravity of humanistic quests to the individual: after all, a person could give examples of the direct embodiment of the ideal , a separate person, but not alienated from history. That is why Zweig composed mostly “novelized biographies” in those years. At the very beginning of the 1930s, however, he spoke to Vl. Lidin and informed K. Fedin in a letter that he would definitely complete the novel. Apparently, it was about the "Datura of Transfiguration", a book that was never completed. In addition, Zweig told Lidin that “when such great events take place in history, you don’t want to invent them in art...”. And this same thought, in a much more categorical form, was voiced in one of Zweig’s interviews in 1941: “In the face of war, the depiction of the private lives of fictional figures seems to him something frivolous; Every plot that is made up comes into sharp contradiction with history. Therefore, the literature of the coming years should be documentary in nature.
This was, of course, only Zweig's individual decision. But it seemed to him universally obligatory, because in fact it had become inevitable for him. This inevitability determined the whole structure of Zweig's documentalism.
In The World of Yesterday (1942), his posthumously published memoirs, Zweig tried to find something like the “nerve” of his own creativity. Referring to the early play “Thersites,” he wrote: “This drama already reflected a certain feature of my mental makeup - never take the side of the so-called “heroes” and always find the tragic only in the vanquished. Defeated by fate - that’s what attracts me in my short stories, and in biographies - the image of someone whose rightness triumphs not in the real space of success, but only in a moral sense: Erasmus, not Luther, Mary Stuart, not Elizabeth, Castellio, not Calvin; and then I, too, took as a hero not Achilles, but the most insignificant of his opponents, Thersites, I preferred a suffering person to one whose strength and determination make others suffer.”
Not everything here is indisputable: Zweig changed, Zweig hesitated, Zweig was mistaken both at the beginning and at the end of his journey, and his self-assessments - even the final ones - do not coincide with reality in everything. For example, “Magellan’s Feat” (1937) is difficult to reduce to the formula: “the tragic is only in the vanquished,” because the hero of this book is from the breed of winners, from those about whom Gorky wrote to Fedin in 1924: “Damn all the vices of man along with His virtues - this is not why he is significant and dear to me - he is dear because of his will to live, his monstrous stubbornness to be something greater than himself, to break out of the loops - the tight network of the historical past, to jump above his head, to escape the cunning of the mind. ..” This is exactly what Zweig’s Magellan is like - a man obsessed with an idea, and therefore accomplished the unthinkable. He not only found a strait that seemed not to exist, not only circumnavigated the globe, but also won the game against his rebellious captains, because he knew how to be cunning, he knew how to count. It should not be considered only within the coordinates of morality; after all, the author himself, having told about one of the turns of Magellan’s struggle, summarizes: “So, it is quite obvious that the officers have right on their side, and Magellan has necessity on his side.” And necessity for Zweig in this case is more important, because, as he writes, “moments in history become miraculous when the genius of an individual enters into an alliance with the genius of the era, when an individual is imbued with the creative languor of his time.” That is why Magellan wins, wins everything - even his own defeats. A stupid, accidental death on a tiny island of the Philippine archipelago, glory that went to someone else for a while - what does all this weigh in comparison with the great victory of human progress, the victory that Magellan started and carried out? And if the author emphasizes Magellanic defeats in a certain way, it is not in order to cast a shadow on him as a “hero”. Rather, a shadow falls on a society that did not understand or appreciate Magellan. And at the same time, the role of chance, the tortuosity, and paradoxicality of the paths of human history are emphasized. Moreover, accidents and paradoxes are required not only by Zweig the thinker, but also by Zweig the artist: with their help, he, a writer based on life empirics, builds a fascinating plot.
It is also not entirely true that Zweig in Mary Stuart (1935) chose between two queens and chose the Scottish queen. Mary and Elizabeth are equal in size. “... It is not an accident,” he writes, “that the struggle between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth was decided in favor of the one who personified the progressive, viable principle, and not the one who was turned back to the knightly past; with Elizabeth, the will of history won..." And a little lower: "Elizabeth, as a sober realist, wins in history, the romantic Mary Stuart - in poetry and legend." Even more clearly than in Magellan's Labor, historical necessity dominates here, and literary necessity emerges even more clearly than there.
Zweig says: “If Mary Stuart lives for herself, then Elizabeth lives for her country...” And yet he writes a book not about Elizabeth, but about Mary (and in this sense, of course, “chooses” her). But why? Because she won “in poetry and in legend,” and thus is more suitable for the role of a literary heroine. “... Such is the peculiarity of this fate (it is not without reason that it attracts playwrights) that all great events seem to be pulled together into short episodes of elemental force,” explains Zweig. But he himself made the life and death of Mary Stuart not a drama, not a tragedy, but a “novelized biography,” although not eschewing theatrical effects.
In principle, Zweig's narrative avoids fiction here. Even after depicting Mary on the night of Darnley’s murder as Lady Macbeth, the writer adds: “Only the Shakespeares, only the Dostoevskys are capable of creating such images, as well as their greatest mentor - Reality.” But he organizes this reality not so much as a documentarian, but as a writer, as an artist. And above all, where he looks into the souls of his characters, tries to unravel their motives, comprehend their natures, embrace their passions.
It is not difficult to imagine Mary Stuart as the heroine of such a short story as “Amok”, as “Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman”, as “Street in the Moonlight”. Isn’t her passion for Darnley, which suddenly flared up and just as suddenly gave way to hatred, isn’t her frantic love for Bothwell, almost surpassing ancient examples, akin to those passions and the love that Mrs. K. or the proud colonial lady experienced? But there are differences, and significant ones at that. Zweig did not undertake to explain the behavior of a well-bred lady from society, who is instantly ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of an unfamiliar and not at all trustworthy man. In any case, explain it with something other than the power of nature, the power of instincts. With Mary Stuart it is different. She is a queen, surrounded by luxury from the cradle, accustomed to the idea of the indisputability of her desires, and “nothing,” Zweig states, “turned the life line of Mary Stuart towards the tragic like the insidious ease with which fate elevated her to the top of the earthly earth.” authorities". Before us is not only the character of a historical person, but also a character determined by historical and social affiliation.
Zweig, as we remember, refused to judge the heroes of his short stories. He judges the heroes of “novelized biographies”. This is a court of history, but at the same time a moral court. Mary Stuart is given a different verdict than Magellan, because the goals are different, the meanings of their impressive desire to “be something greater than themselves” are different.
Perhaps precisely because in his biographies he has a system of coordinates, within which an individual person can be assessed quite objectively, Zweig decided to turn his gaze to entirely negative figures. Such is Joseph Fouché, the executioner of Toulon, who consistently and invariably betrayed everyone he served: Robespierre, Barras, Bonaparte. Joseph Fouché, whose political portrait was painted in 1929. Before (and for the most part after), Zweig’s protagonists in one way or another confronted the world of evil, violence and injustice. Fouché fits into this world without a trace. True, it fits in almost brilliantly in its own way, so you can’t immediately figure out who is dancing to whose tune: either Fouche is to the tune of the bourgeoisie that has seized power, or this bourgeoisie is to Fouche’s tune. He is the personification of Bonapartism, much more consistent than Napoleon himself. There was a lot of humanity in the emperor, something that does not fit into the system, which brings him closer to Magellan or Mary Stuart; the minister is the system itself, only taken to the limit of typification. All of it was embodied in Fouche as in some kind of fantastic grotesque written from life. That is why his portrait became a portrait of the vices and sins of the era. What we have before us is something like a parody of Machiavellian “The Prince” (1532), for Fouché’s Machiavellianism already dates back to the times of the approaching bourgeois decline.
In “Joseph Fouche,” the arrangement of figures that is closest to his “mental makeup,” which Zweig talks about in “Yesterday’s World,” is inverted. Choosing Erasmus and not Luther, Mary Stuart and not Elizabeth, the writer would have to choose Napoleon as the hero for this book, not Fouche. So here, too, Zweig deviated from his own rule. And yet it remains a rule for him. At least, the most favorite, most commonly used option. Even in connection with his drama “Jeremiah,” Rolland said: “... there are defeats more fruitful than victories...” This is similar to the words of Michel Montaigne: “There are defeats, the glory of which makes the victors jealous.” Maybe Rolland paraphrased them, or maybe he quoted them from memory. Another thing is more important: not only did he attribute these words to Zweig’s hero, Zweig himself did the same when, years later, he put the corresponding passage from Montaigne’s “Experiences” (1572 - 1592) as an epigraph to the book “Conscience against violence. Castellio vs. Calvin" (1936). The idea of the victoriousness of the vanquished seemed to frame the writer’s path.
In “Conscience Against Violence” it gains some kind of completion. Fanatic John Calvin conquers Geneva. “Like a barbarian, he burst into Catholic churches with his guard of stormtroopers... He forms the Jungfolk from street boys, he recruits crowds of children so that they fly into cathedrals during services and disrupt the service with screams, squeals, and laughter...” Modern allusions are exposed. ; they may even seem intrusive. The reason for this is the political situation: Hitler had just seized power, had just set fire to the Reichstag. However, it's not just that. Zweig needed to oppose Calvin to Castellio absolutely (it is not for nothing that the word “against” appears twice in the title, and the text itself begins with a quote from Castellio: “A fly against an elephant”). On the one hand, an all-powerful dictator, a dogmatist, who subordinated to his will not only religion, but also the most insignificant details of the life of his fellow citizens. On the other is a humble university scientist, with no power over anything except a blank sheet of paper, representing no one but himself. Contrast brought to sterile purity. In the person of Calvin, we again encounter a negative hero unusual for Zweig. But this time he lacks the persuasiveness of Joseph Fouché, for the anti-Catholicism of the real Calvin - for all its extremes - had its own historical meaning; and Castellio is a little artificial. Even the Spaniard Miguel Servetus, who entered into a theological dispute with Calvin and was burned by him for this, seemed to be slightly stupid. He is not an ally of Castellio, he is just an excuse to speak out. Castellio, as Zweig conceived him, must remain alone, for, multiplied by weakness, it shades his feat.
The feat, however, is the most important thing for Zweig. It was committed in the name of tolerance, in the name of free thought, with faith in man and humanity: “Just as after every flood the water must subside, so every despotism becomes obsolete and cools down; only the idea of spiritual freedom, the idea of all ideas and therefore not subject to anything, can be constantly reborn, for it is eternal as spirit.”
These words from the conclusion to the book about Castellio can, however, be read this way: if tyranny ultimately dies out by itself, and the love of freedom is immortal, then isn’t it sometimes wiser to wait until a more favorable moment comes? Alas, Zweig was sometimes inclined to this conclusion. First of all, in The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934). This is a strange book. Beautifully written, very personal, almost autobiographical and at the same time atypical. After all, her hero is a seeker of political compromises, “quiet” paths, so to speak. Yes, as is usual with Zweig, he did not have success in everyday life, was not understood by the era, for its essence was precisely the fierce battle between Luther and the pope. Zweig was turned away from Luther by the fact that this anti-papist threatened to turn into a Protestant pope. But, like Calvin, he judged Luther somewhat one-sidedly. And - more importantly - he was opposing a different figure to him. Marxist literary criticism sharply criticized him for this. In particular, D. Lukács wrote in 1937: “Such views have long been the common property of abstract pacifism. But they acquire extraordinary significance due to the fact that they were expressed by one of the leading German anti-fascist humanists during the period of Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany, during the period of the heroic liberation struggle of the Spanish people.”8
The Erasmus book was written in the wake of the Nazi takeover. And couldn’t it be that its author, inclined to idealize the paths of human progress, found himself in a state of some kind of shock, which he soon overcame? In any case, he concluded his next book with the words: “... again and again Castellio will rise to fight against every Calvin and defend the sovereign independence of convictions from any violence.”
With all the diversity of Zweig’s “novelized biographies,” they seem to be drawn towards two eras - the 16th century and the border between the 18th and 19th centuries. Of the things not yet mentioned, “Amerigo” belongs to the first era. A Tale of One Historical Mistake" (1942), and for the second - "Marie Antoinette" (1932). The 16th century is the Renaissance, the Reformation, the great geographical discoveries, the line between the 18th and 19th centuries is the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, that is, times of turning point, times of accomplishment, times of struggle. However, while recreating them, Zweig, as we remember, vowed to himself “never to take the side of the so-called “heroes” and always find the tragic only in the vanquished.” I have already tried to show that Zweig did not keep this vow, and, I think, he did not intend to keep it. After all, Castellio is an undoubted hero. Just not in the generally accepted sense, which presupposes the inevitability of momentary victory, success guaranteed, like the payment of dividends in a reputable corporation. In a word, Zweig was not inspired by the hero’s trust in the textbook, official ones, because in the society where he lived, Joseph Fouche won more often than Magellan, not to mention Erasmus or Castellio. That’s why he kept the word “hero” in quotation marks, probably with excessive, but not entirely unfounded, categoricalness.
And yet the concept of the “heroic” is by no means alien to Zweig. Only he seeks its embodiment in a person not endowed with great power and special powers. Actually, in every person, if he, of course, has the right to this name. Speaking about an individual person, Zweig essentially means a person not so much lonely, alienated, but private. His contribution to the general treasury is inconspicuous, but enduring, his example is inspiring; taken together, this is the progress of humanity.
J. -A. Lux, a completely forgotten author of biographical novels, believed that their strength lay in the equalization of celebrities with ordinary people. “We,” wrote Lux, “observe their worries, participate in their humiliating battles with everyday life, and take comfort in the fact that things were no better for the great than for us, the tiny ones.” And this, naturally, flatters vanity...
Zweig is different: he seeks greatness. Even if not in small ways, then in things that are not on stage, not advertised. In all cases - unofficial. And this greatness is special, the greatness not of power, but of spirit.
There is nothing more natural than to look for such greatness primarily in writers, in masters of words.
For more than ten years, Zweig worked on a series of essays called “World Builders.” The title shows how significant he saw the figures represented by these essays. The cycle consists of four books: “Three Masters. Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky" (1920), "Fighting the Demon. Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche" (1925), "Poets of their lives. Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy" (1928), "Healing by the Spirit. Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Freud" (1931).
The persistently repeated number “three” should hardly be given special significance: “The Three Masters” were written, and then, obviously, the love of symmetry began to play a role. What is more noteworthy is that not all of the “world builders” are writers; in The Cure of the Spirit, they are not writers at all. Franz Anton Mesmer - creator of the doctrine of “magnetism”; he was an honestly mistaken and largely successful healer, but ridiculed, persecuted, although (albeit unwittingly) he stimulated some of the discoveries of modern science. He attracted Zweig with his “Magellan-like” stubbornness. But the creator of “Christian Science” Baker-Eddie is present here rather as Fouché. This half-fanatic, half-charlatan fit perfectly into the purely American atmosphere of gullible ignorance and became a multimillionaire. And finally, Sigmund Freud. He is a complex, significant, contradictory phenomenon; it is valued for many reasons by physicians and is often disputed by philosophers and philologists. He had a considerable influence on the writer Zweig, and not only on Zweig. But here Freud interests him primarily as a psychotherapist. For psychotherapy belongs, according to Zweig, to that area of the spirit that is close to writing: both are human studies.
The construction of writer's triads can also surprise. Why did Dostoevsky end up in the same company with Balzac and Dickens, when by the nature of his realism, even, it would seem, from the point of view of Zweig himself, Tolstoy is more suitable to it? As for Tolstoy, like Stendhal, he found himself in a strange neighborhood with the adventurer Casanova.
But proximity should not (at least in Zweig’s eyes) humiliate great writers, for there is a principle here. It consists in the fact that they are taken, first of all, not as creators of immortal spiritual values, but as creative personalities, as certain human types, in a word, in the same way as the hero of Zweig’s “heroic biography” Romain Rolland was taken. This seems to justify Casanova's presence. On the one hand, Zweig admits that he “ended up among the creative minds, in the end, as undeservedly as Pontius Pilate in the creed,” and on the other, he believes that the tribe of “great talents of arrogance and mystical acting”, to to which Kazakov belonged, put forward “the most complete type, the most perfect genius, a truly demonic adventurer - Napoleon.”
And yet the combination of Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy is confusing. And mainly because they are united as “poets of their lives,” that is, aimed primarily at self-expression. Their path, according to Zieig, “does not lead to the boundless world, like the first (meaning Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche - D.Z.), and not to the real one, like the second (meaning Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky. - D.Z.), and back - to one’s own “I”. If we can agree with something else about Stendhal, then Tolstoy is least of all in agreement with the concept of “egotist.”
Zweig refers to "Childhood", "Adolescence", "Youth" (1851 - 1856), to diaries and letters, to autobiographical motifs in "Anna Karenina" and even to Tolstoy's preaching, which he does not accept, which he considers in the light of the preacher's inability to follow own dogmas. Nevertheless, Tolstoy does not want to fit into the Procrustean bed prepared for him.
“The world may not have known another artist,” wrote T. Mann, “in whom the eternally epic, Homeric beginning would be as strong as Tolstoy’s. In his works lives the element of the epic, its majestic monotony and rhythm, like the measured breath of the sea, its tart, powerful freshness, its burning spice, indestructible health, indestructible realism.” This is a different view, although it also belongs to a representative of the West, belonging to the same cultural region as Zweig, and was expressed at about the same time - in 1928.
But here’s what’s curious: when Zweig turns from Tolstoy the man to Tolstoy the artist, his assessments begin to converge with Mann’s. “Tolstoy,” he writes, “tells simply, without emphasis, how the creators of the epic of former times, rhapsodists, psalmists and chroniclers told their myths, when people had not yet learned impatience, nature was not separated from its creations, arrogantly did not distinguish between man and beast , a plant from a stone, and the poet endowed the most insignificant and the most powerful with the same reverence and deification. For Tolstoy looks from the perspective of the universe, therefore completely anthropomorphically, and although morally he is more far from Hellenism than anyone else, as an artist he feels completely pantheistic.”
Zweig could even be suspected of excessive, anachronistic “Homerization” of the author of War and Peace, if not for the reservation regarding Tolstoy’s rejection of the ethics of Hellenism. In other chapters of the essay, Zweig, on the contrary, clearly exaggerates the role of Tolstoy’s personality and thereby, as it were, pits the epic and lyrical principles in his work; This is precisely what makes his book stand out from the crowd of similar ones. After all, Tolstoy was not only a traditional epic writer, but also a novelist who broke the established laws of the genre, a novelist in the newest meaning of the word that the 20th century gave rise to. T. Mann also knew this, for he said in 1939 that Tolstoy’s practice encourages “not to consider the novel as a product of the decay of the epic, but the epic as a primitive prototype of the novel.” Zweig's exaggerations are useful in their own way: if only in that they cast a bright light on the character and nature of innovation in Tolstoy.
In the essay “Goethe and Tolstoy” (1922), T. Mann built the following series: Goethe and Tolstoy, Schiller and Dostoevsky. The first row is health, the second is illness. For Mann, health is not an indisputable virtue, illness is not an indisputable vice. But the series are different, and they differ primarily on this basis. In Zweig, Dostoevsky is combined with Balzac and Dickens, in other words, included in the series of unconditional health (for him, the “sick” series is Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche). However, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky are connected by a different kind of thread: their path - as we have already heard - leads to the real world.
So, Dostoevsky for Zweig is a realist. But the realist is special, so to speak, highly spiritual, because “he always reaches that extreme limit where each form is so mysteriously likened to its opposite that this reality appears fantastic to any ordinary gaze accustomed to the average level.” Zweig calls such realism “demonic”, “magical” and immediately adds that Dostoevsky “in truthfulness, in reality, surpasses all realists.” And this is not a play on words, not juggling terms. This, if you like, is that new concept of realism, which refuses to see its essence in empirical life-likeness, but looks for it where art penetrates into the deep, changeable and ambiguous processes of existence.
Among naturalists, says Zweig, characters are described in a state of complete peace, which is why their portraits “have the unnecessary fidelity of a mask taken from a dead person”; even “the characters of Balzac (also Victor Hugo, Scott, Dickens) are all primitive, monochromatic, purposeful.” For Dostoevsky, everything is different: “... a person becomes an artistic image only in a state of highest excitement, at the culmination point of feelings,” and he is internally mobile, incomplete, unequal to himself at any moment, possessing a thousand unrealized possibilities. Zweig's opposition sins with a certain artificiality. Especially where it concerns Balzac, whom Zweig, by the way, highly valued, whose image he turned to more than once (his biography of Balzac, written over thirty years and remaining unfinished, was published in 1946). But such is the writing style of our author: he works on contrasts. In addition, Dostoevsky is his favorite artist, the one closest to him.
This is what is essential, however: partiality does not exclude the fact that the truth is nevertheless captured. Most of Balzac's heroes are driven by a passion for money. Satisfying her, they almost always act in the same way, in fact purposefully. But not because they are “primitive”, “one-color”. They simply find themselves in an extremely typified, even, one might say, generalized situation, which helps to reveal their social nature. And they either win their game or lose it. And Dostoevsky’s heroes are simultaneously influenced by many factors, external and internal, which both help and hinder them, distorting the entire line of their behavior. So, as I already mentioned, it also happens that, for example, Ganya Ivolgin from “The Idiot” does not take the huge money thrown into the fireplace by Nastasya Filippovna, although it is intended for him and he is destined for it with all his essence. Physically it’s easy to take them, but the soul doesn’t allow it. And not because Ganya is moral - it was such a moment that it was impossible. The situation here is more real, because it is more specific; more real, because the hero’s behavior is more specific. It is more social than in Balzac’s, since it depends on the social atmosphere, and not just on its dominants.
But Zweig just didn’t see this. “They know only the eternal, not the social world,” he says about Dostoevsky’s heroes. Or in another place: “His cosmos is not a world, but only a person.” It is this focus on man that makes Dostoevsky close to Zweig. But it also seems to him that Dostoevsky’s man is too ethereal: “His body is created around the soul, the image is created only around passion.” It is possible that this visual defect is caused by diligent reading of Dm's books. Merezhkovsky, because it seems that from the latter’s research “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Life and Creativity" (1901 - 1902) the following thought, for example, migrated to Zweig: "Every hero is his (Dostoevsky - D.Z.) servant, the herald of the new Christ, the martyr and the herald of the third Kingdom."
Zweig did not understand much about Dostoevsky, but still grasped the main thing - the stability and novelty of realism, as well as the fact that “the tragedy of every hero of Dostoevsky, every discord and every dead end stems from the fate of the entire people.”
If Dostoevsky seemed to Zweig to be insufficiently social, then Dickens, in his eyes, is somewhat overly social: he is “the only one of the great writers of the nineteenth century whose subjective intentions completely coincide with the spiritual needs of the era.” But not, they say, in the sense that it met her needs for self-criticism. No, rather the needs for self-soothing, self-satisfaction. “... Dickens is a symbol of prosaic England,” the singer of its Victorian timelessness. This is supposedly where his unheard-of popularity comes from. It is described with such care and such skepticism, as if Zweig’s pen had been guided by, say, Hermann Broch. But perhaps the fact is that in Dickens’s fate Zweig saw a prototype of his own fate? She bothered him, and he tried to free himself from anxiety in such an unusual way?
Be that as it may, Dickens is presented as if he had never written Bleak House, Little Dorrit, or Dombey and Son, or depicted what British capitalism really is. Of course, as an artist, Zweig gives Dickens his due - his artistic talent, his humor, and his keen interest in the world of the child. It cannot be denied that Dickens, as Zweig notes, “tried again and again to rise to tragedy, but each time he came only to melodrama,” that is, that in some ways Zweig’s portrait of him is correct. And yet, this portrait is noticeably displaced, quite far from the coveted objectivity of scientific analysis.
There is something that could be called “literary literary criticism.” I do not mean those writers who, like the American Robert Penny Warren, were equally skilled in poetry and criticism, but those who primarily wrote about literature, but inevitably also wrote about it. “Writing literary criticism” has its own characteristics. It is not so much objective as directly figurative; less often uses the names of characters, titles of works, and their dates; analyzes less and conveys more the overall impression, even the interpreter’s own emotions. Or, on the contrary, having admired a certain detail, he highlights it, lifts it up, losing interest in the artistic whole. This, however, is rather a form of presenting material, sometimes inherent in pure critics if they have the appropriate talent. But “literary literary criticism” also has its own specific content side. When considering a fellow writer, the writer cannot, and sometimes does not want, to be impartial to him. We are not talking about differences in worldview (they go without saying for a professional critic), but about the fact that each artist has his own path in art, coinciding with some predecessors and contemporaries, but not with others, no matter how significant they may be. thinkers and writers. Tolstoy, as we know, did not like Shakespeare; and this, in fact, does not testify against him in any way - it only highlights his originality.
Zweig’s essay on Dickens is a kind of example of “writer’s literary criticism”: Zweig is with Dostoevsky and therefore not with Dickens.
Even in the preface to Poets of Their Lives, Zweig discussed the painful difficulties of writing autobiographies: every now and then you slip into poetry, because it is almost unthinkable to tell the true truth about yourself; it is easier to knowingly slander yourself. So he reasoned. But, finding himself overseas, having lost everything he had and loved, yearning for Europe, which was taken from him by Hitler and the war provoked by Hitler, he shouldered these painful difficulties and created the book “Yesterday's World. Memories of a European", which was published in 1942, after his death. However, Zweig did not write an autobiography - at least in the sense in which Rousseau or Stendhal, Kierkegaard or Tolstoy did it. Rather, in the sense of Goethe's Poetry and Truth. Like Goethe, Zweig is, of course, at the center of his story. However, not in the role of the main object. He is a connecting thread, he is a bearer of certain knowledge and experience, someone who does not confess, but talks about what he observed and came into contact with. In a word, "Yesterday's World" is a memoir. But - I have already said - they are something more, for they still bear a clear trace of the personality of the author, a once world-famous writer. The trace appears in the assessments given to people, events and, above all, the era as a whole. Even more precisely: two comparable eras - the turn of the last and present centuries and the times in which the book was written.
Some of Zweig's assessments can be confusing. It seems as if he forgot about everything he wrote about Mary Stuart, and, like her, turned back to his own “knightly past.” After all, he defined the decades preceding the First World War as the “golden age of reliability” and chose the Danube Empire as the most convincing example of the then stability and tolerance. “Everything in our thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy,” Zweig argued, “seemed to last forever, and the state is the highest guarantor of this permanence.”
It is a myth. The “Habsburg myth,” which is still quite widespread to this day, despite the fact that the empire collapsed, that long before the collapse it lived, as they say, by God’s permission, that it was torn apart by irreconcilable contradictions, that it was considered a historical relic, that even if it did not keep its subjects in bridle, it was only because of senile impotence that all its major writers, starting with Grillparzer and Stifter, felt and expressed the approach of the inevitable end.
Broch, in his book “Hofmannsthal and His Time” (1951), described the Austrian theatrical and literary life of the 10s as a “gay Apocalypse.” And Zweig talks about the flowering of the arts and how the spirit of Vienna itself contributed to it during the reign of Franz Joseph, Vienna - a grateful and at the same time demanding connoisseur...
The “Habsburg myth” is unequivocal, but the adherence to this myth is not unambiguous. To declare the author of “Yesterday’s World” a retrograde and turn away from his book would be the easiest thing to do, but it’s hardly the most correct thing. Zweig was not the only Austrian writer to come to accept, even glorify, the old imperial Austria, as if blown away by the wind of history. For some, the same path turned out to be even steeper, even more unexpected, even more paradoxical. I. Roth, E. von Horvath, F. Werfel began in the 20s as left-wing artists (sometimes with a leftist bias) and in the 30s they felt themselves to be monarchists and Catholics. That was not their betrayal, that was their Austrian fate.
A purely Austrian dilemma shrouded their world. In their best works they criticized the Austrian insignificance; only in their criticism are the sounds of a requiem heard. They can even be heard in “The Man Without Qualities” by R. Musil (the novel on which he worked throughout the interwar years and which he never finished), although for Musil “this grotesque Austria is ... nothing more than a particularly clear example of the newest world." In an extremely pointed form, he found in it all the vices of modern bourgeois existence. However, there is also something else - that somewhat patriarchal point of view from which these vices are highlighted in contrast. Here Musil (like some other Austrians) draws closer to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who rejected Western capitalism, standing on the position of an integral personality, not yet alienated and not atomized in backward Russia, or with Faulkner, who opposed his soulless, “dollar” American North the slave-owning, “savage” but more human South.
Zweig is like and unlike them all. At first he did not think of himself as an Austrian at all. In 1914, in the magazine Literary Echo, he published a note “About the “Austrian” poet,” where he stated among other things: “Many of us (and I can say this with complete certainty about myself) have never understood what it means when we are called “Austrian writers.” Then, even while living in Salzburg, he considered himself a “European”. His short stories and novels, however, remain Austrian in theme, but his “novelized biographies,” “Builders of the World” and other works of the documentary genre are addressed to the global. But wasn’t there also something Austrian in this persistent striving for the human universe, disregarding state and time boundaries, in this “openness” to all winds and all “finest hours of humanity”? After all, the Danube Empire seemed like something like such a universe, at least its working model: a prototype of Europe, even of the entire sublunary world. It was worth moving from Fiume to Innsbruck, especially to Stanislav, so that, without crossing a single state border, you would find yourself in a completely different region, as if on another continent. And at the same time, the “European” Zweig was drawn to flee from the real Habsburg narrowness, the immutable Habsburg immobility. Especially in the years between the two world wars, when all that was left of the great power, in his own words, was “only a disfigured skeleton, bleeding from all the veins.”
But allowing oneself the luxury of not taking into account one’s Austrian affiliation was conceivable only as long as at least some kind of Austria existed. While still writing Casanova, Zweig seemed to have a presentiment of this: “the old citoyen du monde (citizen of the universe), he writes, begins to freeze in the once so beloved infinity of the world and even sentimentally yearn for his homeland.” However, Zweig himself first needed to physically lose it in order to truly find it in his soul. Even before the Anschluss, he lived in England, but legally, with a passport of a sovereign republic in his pocket. When the Anschluss took place, he turned into an undesirable foreigner without citizenship, and with the outbreak of the war, into a native of the enemy camp. “... A person needs,” it is said in “Yesterday’s World,” “only now, having become a wanderer no longer of his own free will, but fleeing from a pursuit, I felt it to the fullest, - a person needs a starting point from where you set off on a journey and where you return again and again.” Thus, at the cost of tragic losses, Zweig won his national feeling.
So far, he's not too different from Roth. However, the acquisition of a spiritual homeland was not accompanied by his arrival at Catholicism and legitimism. In his speech at Roth’s grave, Zweig said that “he could neither approve of this turn, nor, much less, personally repeat it...”. This was said in 1939. And three years later, Zweig himself, in some way, came to the “Habsburg myth.” And yet different from Roth, and in some ways for different reasons.
“As for our views on life,” writes Zweig in “Yesterday’s World,” “we have long rejected the religion of our fathers, their faith in the rapid and constant progress of humanity; It seems banal to us, cruelly taught by bitter experience, their short-sighted optimism in the face of a catastrophe, which with one single blow wiped out the thousand-year gains of humanists. But even if it was an illusion, it was still wonderful and noble... And something deep in my soul, despite all the experience and disappointment, prevents me from completely renouncing it... I again and again raise my eyes to those stars that shone over my childhood, and I take comfort in the faith inherited from my ancestors that this nightmare will someday turn out to be just a disruption in the eternal movement Forward and Forward.”
This is the key passage of the entire book, which is why I allowed myself to quote it so widely. In the midst of all the personal and social cataclysms of the early 40s, Zweig is still an optimist. But he - such as he is, with all his prejudices and hopes - has nothing to cling to, nothing to rely on, except for his unexpectedly acquired homeland. She is crushed, she is trampled, moreover, she is turned into part of the criminal “Third Reich”. And it turns out that there is no other way to take advantage of this support than to go back to the times when it was still there, still existed, and the very fact of its existence inspired faith. Such a homeland coincides with the Habsburg monarchy in the last decades of its earthly existence. And Zweig recognizes it, recognizes it because it is the country of his childhood, that it is a country of accessible illusions that has not known war for almost half a century, but above all because he now has no other. This is his utopia, from which Zweig demands nothing but utopianism. Because she understands that she is “yesterday’s world,” doomed and rightfully dead. It was not the rough and cruel reality that killed her, broke her, like a fragile, non-viable flower. No, she herself was this reality, one of its survival forms.
Only at the beginning of the book is given a bright, “chivalrous” image of “yesterday’s world” - a concentrated and, what is especially noteworthy, incorporeal image. Then, as it materializes, it disintegrates. “The old world around us, focusing all its thoughts exclusively on the fetish of self-preservation, did not like youth, moreover, it was suspicious of youth,” writes Zweig. And then follow the pages that tell how, in essence, hell the old Austrian school was for a child, breaking more than educating, how much callous hypocrisy it brought, and indeed the morals of that time in general, into the relationship between men and women. External chastity, based on secretly legalized and encouraged prostitution, was not only a deception; it also distorted souls.
Having declared Vienna the capital of the arts, Zweig soon refuted himself with this at least remark: “The Viennese Max Reinhardt would have had to wait patiently in Vienna for two decades to achieve the position that he won in Berlin in two years.” And the point is not that Berlin of the 10s was better - it’s just that Zweig almost deliberately exposes the illusory nature of the original image.
The image, however, has already played its role - it created a contrasting background for the subsequent presentation, it drew the line from which the presentation of a stern humanistic account of fascism and war begins. Zweig painted an accurate and truthful picture of European tragedy. It is gloomy, but not hopeless, because it is brightened by people, as always with him, individual, but not retreating, not defeated. These are Rodin, Rolland, Rilke, Richard Strauss, Maserel, Benedetto Croce. They are friends, associates, sometimes just acquaintances of the author. Different characters pass before us - warriors of the spirit like Rolland and pure artists like Rilke. Since each of them is an integral part of the culture of the era, their portraits are valuable in themselves. But more importantly, taken together they justify Zweig’s confidence “in the eternal movement Forward and Forward.”
Over the coffin of Joseph Roth, Zweig proclaimed: “We dare not lose courage, seeing how our ranks are thinning, we do not even dare to indulge in sadness, seeing how the best of our comrades fall to the right and left of us, for, as I have already said, we We are at the front, in its most dangerous sector.” And he did not forgive Roth for killing himself by drinking. And four years later, in Petropolis near Rio de Janeiro, he and his wife voluntarily died. Does this mean that the war and exile were, in Werfel's words, "a blow that Zweig could not bear"? If yes, then only on a personal level. After all, he concluded his suicide letter with the words: “I greet all my friends. Perhaps they will see the dawn after a long night. I, the most impatient, leave before them.” In terms of worldview, Zweig remained an optimist.
Optimism, multiplied by the talent of the storyteller, provided him with the worthy place that he still occupies on the literary Olympus.
Notes
1 Der große Europäer Stefan Zweig. Muüchen, S. 278 - 279.
2 Rolland R. Collection. Op. in 14 volumes, vol. 14. M., 1958, p. 408.
3 Mitrokhin L.N. Stefan Zweig: fanatics, heretics, humanists. — In the book: Zweig S. Essays. M., 1985, p. 6.
4 Mitrokhin L.N. Stefan Zweig: fanatics, heretics, humanists. — In the book: Zweig S. Essays. M., 1985, p. 5 - 6.
5 Aufbau and Untergang. Osterreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938. Wien - München - Zürich, 1981, S. 393.
6 Kuser N.Über den historischen Roman. — In: Die Literatur 32. 1929-1930, S. 681-682.
7 Osterreichische Literatur der dreißiger Jahre. Wien-Koln-Graz, 1985.
8 Lukaсs G. Der historische Roman. Berlin, 1955, S. 290.
Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer who became 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 factory. Zweig did not talk about his childhood and adolescence, speaking about the typicality of this period of life for representatives of his environment.
Having received his education at the gymnasium, Stefan became a student at the University of Vienna in 1900, where he studied German studies and novels in depth at the Faculty of Philology. While still a student, his debut poetry collection “Silver Strings” was published. The aspiring writer sent his book to Rilke, under the influence of whose creative style it was written, and the consequence of this act was their friendship, interrupted only by the death of the second. During these same years, literary critical activity also began: Berlin and Vienna 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 a period of active travel in Zweig’s life. 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, and 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 articles, plays, and short stories of an anti-war orientation. He called Rolland himself “the conscience of Europe.” During these same years, he created a number of essays, the main characters of which were M. Proust, T. Mann, M. Gorky and others. Throughout 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, united under the title “Builders of the World” (Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Stendhal, etc.). At the same time, S. Zweig worked on short stories, and 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 works 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. The writer tried his hand at the novel genre only twice, because he understood that his calling was short stories, and attempts to write a large-scale canvas turned into failure. Only “Impatience of the Heart” and the unfinished “Frenzy of Transfiguration” came out of his pen, which was published four decades after the author’s death.
The last period of Zweig’s life was associated with a constant change of residence. Being a Jew, he could not remain living in Austria after the Nazis came to power. In 1935, the writer moved to London, but did not feel completely safe in the capital of Great Britain, so he left the continent and in 1940 found himself in Latin America. In 1941, he temporarily moved to the United States, but then returned to Brazil, where he settled in the not very large city of Petropolis.
Literary activity continues, Zweig publishes literary criticism, essays, a 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 Hitler’s troops and the death of Europe, and this led the writer to despair, he plunged into severe depression. Being in another part of the world, he did not have the opportunity to communicate with friends, and 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 died.
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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 generally accepted norms. The works of Zweig Stefan are real literature with elegant language, impeccable plot and images of heroes, 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 into 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 valued personal freedom from childhood and achieved what he wanted.
The beginning of a creative journey
He began writing early, his first articles appeared in magazines in Vienna and Berlin in 1900. After high school, he entered the university at the Faculty of Philology, where he studied German and Romance Studies. As a freshman, he published the collection “Silver Strings.” Composers M. Reder and R. Strauss wrote music to his poems. At the same time, the young author’s first short stories were published.
In 1904 he graduated from the university, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In the same year, he published a collection of short stories “The Love of Erica Ewald” and translations of poems by E. Verhaeren, a Belgian poet. Over the next two years, Zweig travels a lot - India, Europe, Indochina, America. During the war he writes anti-war works.
Tries to experience life in all its diversity. He collects sheet music, manuscripts, and objects of great people, as if he wants to know 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. Verhaeren. 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; she was close to breaking up with her husband. 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. Separating, they exchanged letters. Zweig Stefan is sincere in his feelings, he tells his wife about his experiences, emerging depressions. The couple are happy. After living a long and happy 18 years, they divorced in 1938. Stefan marries a year later to his secretary Charlotte, who is devoted to him to death both literally and figuratively.
State of mind
Doctors periodically send Zweig to rest from “overwork.” But he can’t fully relax, he is famous, he is recognized. It is difficult to judge what the doctors meant by “overwork,” physical or mental fatigue, but the doctors’ intervention was necessary. Zweig traveled a lot, Frederica had two children from her first marriage, and she could not always accompany her husband.
The life of a writer is filled with meetings and travel. 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, not even death, but illness and old age frighten him. He recalls the mental crisis of L. Tolstoy: “The wife has become alien, the children are indifferent.” It is not known whether Zweig had real reasons for alarm, but in his mind they were.
Emigration
Heating up in Europe. Unknown people searched Zweig's house. The writer went to London, his wife remained in Salzburg. Perhaps because of the children, perhaps she was left to solve some problems. But judging by the letters, the relationship between them seemed warm. The writer became a British citizen, wrote tirelessly, but was sad: Hitler was gaining strength, everything was collapsing, genocide was looming. In May, the writer’s books were publicly burned at the stake in Vienna.
Against the backdrop of the political situation, a personal drama also developed. The writer was frightened by his age, he was full of worries about the future. In addition, emigration also had an impact. Despite seemingly favorable circumstances, it requires a lot of mental effort from a person. Stefan Zweig was enthusiastically greeted and treated kindly in England, America, and Brazil, and his books were sold out. But I didn't want to write. In the midst of all these difficulties, a tragedy occurred in the divorce from Frederica.
The last letters reveal a deep mental crisis: “The news from Europe is terrible,” “I won’t see my home again,” “I’ll be a temporary guest everywhere,” “all that remains 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 did not formulate them into something completely artistic, nor into documentary, nor into true novels. Zweig's determining factor in composing them was not only his own literary taste, but also the general idea arising from his view of history. The writer's heroes were people who were ahead of their time, who stood above the crowd and opposed it. From 1920 to 1928, the three-volume book “Builders of the World” was published.
- The first volume, “Three Masters,” about Dickens, Balzac and Dostoevsky, 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 painters 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, and 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 duality, when chaos pulls forward, and the soul pulls back, towards humanity. They end their journey in madness or suicide.
- In 1928, the last volume, “Three Singers of Their Lives,” was released, telling the story of Tolstoy, Stendhal and Casanova. It is no coincidence that the author combined these disparate names in one book. Each of them, no matter what they wrote, filled the works with their own “I”. Therefore, the names of the greatest master of French prose, Stendhal, the seeker and creator of the moral ideal, Tolstoy, and the brilliant adventurer Casanova, stand side by side in this book.
Human destinies
Zweig's dramas "The Comedian", "City by the Sea", "The Legend of a Life" did not bring stage success. But his historical novels and stories gained worldwide fame; they were translated into many languages and republished several times. Stefan Zweig's stories tactfully and yet frankly describe the most intimate human experiences. Zweig's short stories are fascinating in plot, 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 drives. These include unique psychological short stories stylized as medieval legends “Street in the Moonlight”, “Letter from a Stranger”, “Fear”, “First Experience”. In “Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman,” the author describes the passion for profit, which can kill every living thing in a person.
During these same years, collections of short stories “Stars of Humanity” (1927), “Confusion of Feelings” (1927), and “Amok” (1922) were published. In 1934, Zweig was forced to emigrate. He lived in the UK, USA, the writer's choice 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, it was alien to the writer to speculate on any facts. He masterfully worked with documents, in any evidence, 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. To this day it is full of unsolved 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 was a series of pleasures. She had no idea that outside the opera house there was 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 of his works are incomparable. Each has its own shade, taste, life. Even read and re-read biographies are like an epiphany, like a revelation. You read as if 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.
Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer, author of the short stories 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman and Letter from a Stranger. Moritz Zweig, the owner of a textile factory in Vienna, had an heir in November 1881, who was named Stefan. The child was raised by a mother named Ida Brettauer. The woman came from a family of bankers. The period of childhood is practically not studied by biographers of Stefan Zweig.
After this, a new stage in Zweig’s life began. The talented young man ended up at the University of Vienna. Philosophy captured Stefan, so the writer received a doctorate after 4 years of study.
At the same time, the young talent created a collection of poems, which he called “Silver Strings.” Stefan Zweig's work during this period was influenced by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke. Stefan began a friendly correspondence with the poet Rilke. The men exchanged their own essays and wrote reviews of the works.
Studying at the University of Vienna has come to an end, Stefan Zweig’s great journey has begun. For 13 years, the author of “Letter from a Stranger” visited London and Paris, Italy and Spain, the USA and Cuba, India and Indochina, Panama and Switzerland. The young poet chose Salzburg as his permanent place of residence.
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). During the last years of the First World War he lived in Switzerland (1917-1918), and after the war he settled near Salzburg.
Literature
After moving to Salzburg, Stefan Zweig sat down to create a short story called “Letter from a Stranger.” This work impressed readers and critics of the time. The author tells an amazing story about a stranger and a writer. The girl sent a letter in which she told about all-consuming love and the vicissitudes of fate, the intersections of the paths of the main characters.
The first meeting of the writer and the stranger occurred when the girl turned 13 years old. The novelist lived next door. Soon there was a move, because of which the teenage girl had to suffer in splendid isolation, without seeing her loved one. The long-awaited return to Vienna allowed the stranger to plunge back into the romantic world.
Unexpectedly, the lady learns about pregnancy, but the child’s father is unaware of this important event. The next meeting with his lover took place 11 years later, but the writer never recognized the woman as the only one with whom the affair lasted three days. The stranger decided to write a letter to the only man whom the lady had thought about all her life, after the death of the child. A heartfelt story that touches the soul of the most callous person formed the basis of the films.
Zweig has incredible skill, which is revealed gradually. But the peak of his career came with the release of the short stories “Amok”, “Confusion of Feelings”, “Mendel the Bookseller”, “Chess Short Story”, “Humanity’s Finest Hours”, that is, for the period from 1922 to 1941. What is it about the author’s words and sentences that made thousands of people in pre-war times happily leaf through volumes of Zweig’s works?
Everyone, without exception, believed that the unusual nature of the plots provided an opportunity to reflect, to think about what was happening, about how unfair fate can sometimes be in relation to ordinary people. Stefan believed that the human heart cannot be protected, but it can force one to perform great deeds.
Zweig's short stories were strikingly different from the works of his contemporaries. For many years Stefan worked on his own model of the work. The author took as a basis travel that became either tedious, sometimes adventurous, sometimes dangerous.
The incidents with Zweig’s heroes did not occur on the road, but during stops. According to Stefan, a life-changing moment does not require days or months, just a few minutes or hours.
Zweig did not like to write novels, since he did not understand the genre and was not able to fit an event into a spatial narrative. But among the writer’s works there are books made in this style. These are “Impatience of the Heart” and “Frenzy of Transfiguration”. The author did not finish his last novel due to death. This creation was first published in 1982, and was translated into Russian only in 1985.
From time to time, Stefan Zweig preferred to devote himself entirely to creating biographies of contemporaries and historical heroes. Among them is Joseph Fouche, . These works were of interest to writers, since Zweig took official papers for the plot, but sometimes the author had to include fantasy and psychological thinking.
In the work entitled “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam,” the writer showed feelings and emotions close to his own self. The author liked Erasmus's position on the citizen of the world. The described scientist preferred to live an ordinary life. High positions and other privileges turned out to be alien to the man. Rotterdam didn't like social life. The main goal of the scientist’s life turned out to be independence.
Stefan Zweig showed Erasmus as a condemner of the ignorant and fanatics. The representative of the Renaissance opposed instigators of discord between people. Europe turned into a bloody massacre against the backdrop of growing interethnic and interclass hatred. But Zweig chose to show events from the other side.
Stephen's concept included the idea that Erasmus felt an inner tragedy due to his inability to prevent what was happening. Zweig supported Rotterdam and believed that the First World War was just a misunderstanding that would never happen again. Stefan and tried to achieve this, but his friends failed to save the world from war. During the creation of the book about Erasmus, the writer’s house was searched by the German authorities.
Stephen described the book "Mary Stuart", which was written in 1935, as a novelized biography. Zweig studied numerous letters written by Mary Stuart to the Queen of England. Hatred at a distance - this is how one can describe the relationship between the two crowned heads.
The short story “24 Hours in the Life of a Woman” appeared in 1927. Four years later, the book was filmed by director Robert Land. Modern filmmakers appreciated the novel and presented their version. The new film was released in 2002.
Stefan Zweig became acquainted with Russian literature at the gymnasium. The writer fell in love at first sight with the works of the classics. The author of short stories and novels considers the translation of the collection of essays into Russian to be his main achievement.
He considered Zweig to be a first-class artist, among whose talents there is the gift of a thinker. The Russian writer stated that Stefan could convey the whole gamut of experiences of an ordinary person.
Zweig first visited the Soviet Union in 1928. The visit was associated with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. In Russia, Stefan met Vladimir Lidin and Konstantin Fedin. Zweig's opinion about the Soviet Union soon changed. The writer Romain Rolland expressed his dissatisfaction. The author of the short stories compared the executed Revolutionary veterans with rabid dogs. According to Stefan, such treatment of people is unacceptable.
Personal life
The first wife of Stefan Zweig was Friederike Maria von Winternitz. The marriage of young people took place in 1920.
After 18 years of marriage, Friederike and Stefan filed for divorce. A year passed and a new stamp appeared in the writer’s passport about the conclusion of an alliance with secretary Charlotte Altman.
Death
Back in 1934, Zweig was forced to leave Austria due to Hitler's rise to power. Stefan set up a new home in London. After 6 years, Zweig and his wife went to New York. The writer did not plan to stay in the city of skyscrapers for a long time. The young people went to Petropolis, which is located in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.
Living far from his homeland and the lack of world peace plunged Stefan Zweig into depression. Disappointment led the writer to suicide. The author of the short stories took a lethal dose of drugs with his wife. The couple were found dead. They held hands.
Later, a museum was organized in the house where Stefan Zweig died. And in Austria, for the centenary anniversary, a postage stamp appeared in honor of the writer.
Quotes
There is nothing more terrible than loneliness among people.
A person feels the meaning and purpose of his own life only when he realizes that he is needed by others.
The heart knows how to forget easily and quickly if it wants to forget.
If we all knew everything that is said about all of us, no one would talk to anyone.
Who once found himself, he can not lose anything in this world. And who once understood a person in himself, he understands all people.
Bibliography
- 1901 – “Silver Strings”
- 1911 – “The Governess”
- 1912 – “House by the Sea”
- 1919 - "Three Masters: Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky"
- 1922 – “Amok”
- 1922 – “Letter from a Stranger”
- 1926 – “The Invisible Collection”
- 1927 - "24 hours in the life of a woman"
- 1942 – “Chess novella”
(by the way, this is his favorite writer), the depths and abysses of the soul. Zweig the historian was interested in humanity's finest hours and "fatal moments", heroes and villains, but at the same time he always remained a gentle moralist. The finest psychologist. A refined popularizer. He knew how to grab the reader from the first page and not let go until the end, leading him along the intriguing paths of human destinies. Stefan Zweig loved not only to delve into the biographies of celebrities, but also to turn them inside out so that the bonds and seams of character were exposed. But the writer himself was an extremely secretive person; he did not like to talk about himself and his work. In the autobiography "Yesterday's World" a lot is said about other writers, about his generation, about the time - and a minimum of personal information. Therefore, let's try to draw at least an approximate portrait of him.
Stefan Zweig born on November 28, 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Jewish family. Father, Maurice Zweig, is a manufacturer, a successful bourgeois, well-educated, drawn to culture. Mother, Ida Brettauer, is the daughter of a banker, a beauty and a fashionista, a woman with great pretensions and ambitions. She dealt with her sons much less than governesses. Stefan and Alfred grew up well-groomed and handsome, in wealth and luxury. In the summer we went with our parents to Marienbad or the Austrian Alps. However, his mother's arrogance and despotism put pressure on the sensitive Stefan. Therefore, upon entering the Vienna Institute, he immediately left his parents’ home and began to live independently. Long live freedom!.. “Hatred of everything authoritarian has accompanied me all my life,” Zweig later admits.
Years of study - years of passion for literature and theater. Stefan started reading from childhood. Along with reading, another passion arose - collecting. Already in his youth, Zweig began collecting manuscripts, autographs of great people, and scores of composers.
A short story writer and biographer of famous people, Zweig began his literary career as a poet. He published his first poems at the age of 17 in the magazine Deutsche Dichtung. In 1901, the publishing house “Schuster und Leffler” published the collection of poems “Silver Strings”. One of the reviewers responded: “Quiet, majestic beauty flows from these lines of the young Viennese poet. An enlightenment that you rarely see in the first books of beginning authors. Euphony and richness of images!”
So, a new fashionable poet has appeared in Vienna. But Zweig himself doubted his poetic calling and went to Berlin to continue his education. Meet the Belgian poet Emil Verhaeren prompted Zweig to other activities: he began to translate and publish Verhaarn. Until the age of thirty, Zweig led a nomadic and eventful life, traveling around cities and countries - Paris, Brussels, Ostend, Bruges, London, Madras, Calcutta, Venice ... Travel and communication, and sometimes friendship with famous creators - Verlaine, Rodin, Rolland, Freud , Rilke… Soon Zweig becomes a connoisseur of European and world culture, a man of encyclopedic knowledge.
He switches completely to prose. In 1916 he wrote the anti-war drama Jeremiah. In the mid-1920s, he created his most famous collections of short stories "Amok" (1922) and "Confusion" (1929), which included "Fear", "Moonlight Street", "Sunset of One Heart", "Fantastic Night" , "Mendel the second-hand book dealer" and other short stories with Freudian motifs woven into "Viennese impressionism", and even flavored with French symbolism. The main theme is compassion for a person squeezed by the "Iron Age", entangled in neuroses and complexes.
In 1929, Zweig's first fictionalized biography, Joseph Fouché, appeared. This genre fascinated Zweig, and he created wonderful historical portraits: “Marie Antoinette” (1932), “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” (1934), “Mary Stuart” (1935), “Castelio against Calvin” (1936), “ Magellan" (1938), "Amerigo, or the Story of a Historical Mistake" (1944). More books about Verhaeren, Rolland, “Three singers of their lives - Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy.” Above the biography Balzac Zweig worked for about thirty years.
Zweig said to one of his fellow writers: “The history of outstanding people is the history of complex mental structures... after all, the history of nineteenth-century France without the solution to such personalities as Fouché or Thiers would be incomplete. I'm interested in the paths that certain people took, creating brilliant values, like Stendhal And Tolstoy, or striking the world with crimes like Fouche..."
Zweig studied his great predecessors carefully and lovingly, trying to unravel their actions and movements of the soul, while he did not like winners; he was closer to losers in the struggle, outsiders or madmen. One of his books is about Nietzsche, Kleiste and Hölderlin - this is what is called “The Fight against Madness.”
Zweig's short stories and historical biography novels were read with rapture. In the 20-40s he was one of the most popular authors. It was willingly published in the USSR as “an exposer of bourgeois morals,” but at the same time they never tired of criticizing it for “a superficial understanding of social development only as a struggle between progress (humanism) and reaction, an idealization of the role of the individual in history.” The subtext read: not a revolutionary writer, not a singer of the proletariat, and not ours at all. Zweig was not his own for the Nazis: in 1935, his books were burned in the squares.
At his core, Stefan Zweig is a pure humanist and citizen of the world, an anti-fascist who worshiped liberal values. In September 1928, Zweig visited the USSR and wrote very restrained memoirs about this trip. Having seen the unprecedented enthusiasm of the masses in the country, he at the same time could not directly communicate with ordinary people (he, like any foreigner, was carefully monitored). Zweig especially noted the situation of Soviet intellectuals who found themselves in “difficult conditions of existence” and found themselves “in a tighter framework of spatial and spiritual freedom.”
Zweig put it mildly, but he understood everything, and his guesses were soon confirmed when many Soviet writers fell under the steamroller of repression.
In one of his letters to Romain Rolland, a great admirer of Soviet Russia, Zweig wrote: “So, in your Russia, Zinoviev, Kamenev, veterans of the revolution, the first comrades Lenin shot like mad dogs - repeats what Calvin did when he sent Servetus to the stake because of a difference in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Like Hitler like Robespierre: ideological differences are called "conspiracy"; Wasn't it enough to use a link?"
What kind of person was Stefan Zweig? Perman Kesten in the essay “Stefan Zweig, my friend” wrote: “He was the darling of fate. And he died as a philosopher. In his last letter to the world, he once again said what his goal was. He wanted to build a “new life.” His main joy was intellectual work. And he considered personal freedom to be the highest good... He was an original, complex person, interesting, curious and cunning. Thoughtful and sentimental. Always ready to help and cold, mocking and full of contradictions. Comedian and hard worker, always excited and full of psychological subtleties. Sentimental like a woman and easy on pleasure like a boy. He was talkative and a loyal friend. His success was inevitable. He himself was a veritable treasure trove of literary stories. In fact, a very modest person who perceived himself and the whole world too tragically...”
For many others, Zweig was simple and without much psychological nuance. “He is rich and successful. He is fate’s favorite” - this is a common opinion about the writer. But not all rich people are generous and compassionate. And this is precisely how Zweig was, who always helped his colleagues, even paying some of them a monthly rent. He literally saved the lives of many. In Vienna, he gathered young poets around him, listened, gave advice and treated them to fashionable cafes “Grinsteidl” and “Beethoven”. Zweig did not spend much on himself, avoided luxury, and did not even buy a car. During the day he liked to communicate with friends and acquaintances, and to work at night, when nothing interfered.
. Biography of Zweig
. Suicide in a hotel room
. Zweig's aphorisms
. The Last European
. Biographies of writers
. Austrian writers
. Sagittarius (by zodiac sign)
. Who was born in the Year of the Snake