Zweig biography of Michelangelo. Projects and books
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 do not know success during their 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, his brother Heinrich, Leonhard Frank, Fallada, Feuchtwanger, and Remarque lived and wrote with him at the same time. If you take Zweig as an Austrian, then you simply won’t find competitors for him. No one remembered almost any other Austrian writers - neither Schnitzler, nor Hofmannsthal, nor Hermann Bahr. True, Rilke remained, but only as a complex poet, for a narrow circle. True, in the early - mid-30s Joseph Roth flashed by with his “Job”, with his “Crypt of the Capuchins”, with his “Radetzky March”, but only for a moment, like a comet, and immediately went 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 an authorized 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 history, judged him in approximately the same way latest literature. Naturally, the attitude towards the contribution of a particular writer varies. And not just because tastes change, because 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 seems “wonderful”, “talented”, but turns out to be 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 situation today. 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 ending...
“Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Stefan Zweig admitted at the end of his life. And it is true. For many years he was incredibly lucky, almost always personally. He was born into a rich family and did not know any hardships. Life path Thanks to his early revealed literary talent, he became self-determined. But also Lucky case 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 in this was not; 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. "Need to do last step,” he explains the imperishable meaning of the project, “and all parts of the world will be involved in a grandiose world union, united by a single human consciousness" And referring to 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.
ABOUT central character Zweig’s “Summer Novella” says 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; a destiny that contrastsly highlights 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 doesn't 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 included among them. But Gorky “didn’t really like Amok.” 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 plot is based on 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. This idea is present in “Letter from a Stranger.” 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 fear of your own desires, before the demonic principle in us, forces us to deny the obvious fact that at other hours of her life a woman, being in the power of mysterious forces, loses free will and prudence... and that... a woman who freely and passionately surrenders acts much more honestly your own desire, instead of deceiving your husband in his own arms with your 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, because it fictional biographies are not limited to the boundaries of the interwar twenty years - neither chronologically nor from the point of view 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 neither about his books nor about his sensational interviews with the most prominent politicians no one except a narrow circle of specialists remembers 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 and threw him onto 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 him with immediate hope ( October Revolution he accepted, 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 30s, however, he told Vl. Lidin and reported in a letter to K. Fedin that he would definitely complete the novel. Apparently, they were talking about “Dope 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 image privacy fictional figures seem to him to be something frivolous; Every invented plot 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 entire structure of Zweig’s documentaryism.
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 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, his assessment of Luther was somewhat one-sided. And - more importantly - he contrasted him with another figure. 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 book about Erasmus was written in the fresh wake of the Nazi coup. 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: XVI century and the borders of 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 discoveries 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, in highest degree spiritual, because “it 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 a juggling of 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 artistically only in a state of highest excitement, at the climax of feelings,” and he is internally mobile, incomplete, unequal to himself at any moment, possessing a thousand unrealized possibilities. Zweig's opposition suffers from 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 in an unusual way free yourself from anxiety?
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. It's about not about ideological differences (they are self-evident 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 were as thinkers and as 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. Memoirs 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 stands, of course, at the center of his narrative. However, not as the main object. He - binding 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 also something more, for they still bear a clear trace of the personality of the author, once universally 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 unambiguous, but 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. This was not their treason, this was their Austrian fate.
A purely Austrian dilemma obscured 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 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 both similar and different from 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. "Surrounding us old world“, who focused all his thoughts exclusively on the fetish of self-preservation, did not like youth, moreover, he 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 the 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, like-minded people, 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 und 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.
On February 23, 1942, newspapers around the world carried a sensational front-page headline: “Famous Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Charlotte committed suicide in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.” Under the headline was a photograph that looked more like a still from a Hollywood melodrama: dead spouses in bed. Zweig's face is peaceful and calm. Lotte touchingly laid her head on her husband's shoulder and gently squeezed his hand in hers.
At a time when human carnage was raging in Europe and the Far East, claiming hundreds and thousands of lives every day, this message could not remain a sensation for long. Among his contemporaries, the writer’s act rather caused bewilderment, and among some (for example, Thomas Mann) it was simply indignation: “selfish contempt for his contemporaries.” Even more than half a century later, Zweig’s suicide still looks mysterious. He was considered one of the shoots of that suicidal harvest that the fascist regime collected from the fields of German-language literature. They compared it with similar and almost simultaneous actions of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, Ernst Weiss, and Walter Hasenklever. But there is no similarity here (except, of course, for the fact that all of the above were German-speaking writers - emigrants, and the majority were Jews). Weiss cut his veins when Hitler's troops entered Paris. While in the internment camp, Hasenclever poisoned himself, fearing that he would be handed over to the German authorities. Benjamin took poison, fearing to fall into the hands of the Gestapo: the Spanish border where he found himself was closed. Abandoned by his wife and left penniless, Toller hanged himself in a New York hotel.
Zweig did not have any obvious, ordinary reasons for taking his own life. No creative crisis. No financial difficulties. Neither fatal disease. No problems in my personal life. Before the war, Zweig was the most successful German writer. His works were published all over the world, translated into either 30 or 40 languages. By the standards of the literary community of that time, he was considered a multimillionaire. Of course, from the mid-30s the German book market was closed to him, but there were still American publishers. The day before his death, Zweig sent one of them his last two works, neatly reprinted by Lotte: “The Chess Novella” and the book of memoirs “Yesterday’s World.” Unfinished manuscripts were later discovered in the writer’s desk: a biography of Balzac, an essay about Montaigne, an untitled novel.
Three years earlier, Zweig married his secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was 27 years younger than him and devoted to him to death, as it turned out - in the literal, not figurative sense of the word. Finally, in 1940, he accepted British citizenship - a measure that freed him from the emigrant ordeals with documents and visas, vividly described in Remarque’s novels. Millions of people squeezed into the millstones of a giant European meat grinder could only envy the writer, who was comfortably settled in the paradise town of Petropolis and, together with his young wife, made forays into the famous carnival in Rio. A lethal dose of Veronal is not usually taken in such circumstances.
Of course, many versions have been expressed about the reasons for suicide. They talked about the writer’s loneliness in a foreign Brazil, longing for his native Austria, for a cozy house in Salzburg plundered by the Nazis, for the plunder of a famous collection of autographs, about fatigue and depression. Letters to his ex-wife were quoted (“I continue my work; but only at 1/4 of my strength. It’s just an old habit without any creativity...”, “I’m tired of everything...”, “ Better times have sunk forever...") They recalled the writer’s almost manic fear of the fatal figure of 60 years (“I’m afraid of illness, old age and addiction”). It is believed that the last straw that broke the cup of patience was newspaper reports about the Japanese capture of Singapore and the offensive of Wehrmacht troops in Libya. There were rumors that a German invasion of England was being prepared. Perhaps Zweig feared that the war from which he fled, crossing oceans and continents (England - USA - Brazil - his flight route) would spread to the Western Hemisphere. The most famous explanation was given by Remarque: “People who had no roots were extremely unstable - chance played a decisive role in their lives. If that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could have poured out their souls to someone, at least over the phone, the misfortune might not have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign land among strangers” (“Shadows in Paradise”).
The heroes of many of Zweig's works ended the same way as their author. Perhaps, before his death, the writer remembered his own essay about Kleist, who committed double suicide with Henriette Vogel. But Zweig himself was never a suicidal person.
There is a strange logic in the fact that this gesture of despair ended the life of a man who seemed to his contemporaries to be the darling of fate, the favorite of the gods, the lucky one, the lucky one, born “with a silver spoon in his mouth.” “Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Zweig said at the end of his life. The word “maybe” is not very appropriate here. He was lucky always and everywhere. He was lucky with his parents: his father, Moritz Zweig, was a Viennese textile manufacturer, his mother, Ida Brettauer, belonged to the richest family of Jewish bankers, whose members settled all over the world. Wealthy, educated, assimilated Jews. He was lucky to be born as a second son: the eldest, Alfred, inherited his father's company, and the youngest was given the opportunity to study at the university to receive a university degree and support the family reputation with the title of Doctor of Science.
Lucky with time and place: Vienna late XIX century, the Austrian “Silver Age”: Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Rilke in literature; Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern and Alban Berg in music; Klimt and the Secession in painting; performances of the Burgtheater and the Royal Opera, Freud's psychoanalytic school... The air is saturated with high culture. “The Age of Reliability,” as the nostalgic Zweig dubbed it in his dying memoirs.
Lucky with school. True, Zweig hated the “educational barracks” itself - the state gymnasium, but he found himself in a class “infected” with an interest in art: someone wrote poetry, someone painted, someone was going to become an actor, someone studied music and never missed a single concert, and some even published articles in magazines. Later, Zweig was lucky with the university: attending lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy was free, so he was not exhausted by classes and exams. It was possible to travel, live for a long time in Berlin and Paris, and meet celebrities.
He was lucky during the First World War: although Zweig was drafted into the army, he was sent only to easy work in the military archive. At the same time, the writer - a cosmopolitan and a convinced pacifist - could publish anti-war articles and dramas, and participate, together with Romain Rolland, in the creation of an international organization of cultural figures who opposed the war. In 1917, the Zurich theater began staging his play Jeremiah. This gave Zweig the opportunity to get a vacation and spend the end of the war in prosperous Switzerland.
Lucky with your appearance. In his youth, Zweig was handsome and enjoyed great success at the ladies. A long and passionate romance began with a “letter from a stranger” signed with the mysterious initials FMFV. Friederike Maria von Winternitz was also a writer, the wife of a major official. After the end of the First World War they got married. Twenty years of cloudless family happiness.
But most of all, of course, Zweig was lucky in literature. He began writing early, at the age of 16 he published his first aesthetically decadent poems, and at 19 he published a collection of poems, “Silver Strings,” at his own expense. Success came instantly: Rilke himself liked the poems, and the formidable editor of the most respectable Austrian newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl (the future founder of Zionism), took his articles for publication. But Zweig’s real fame came from the works written after the war: short stories, “novelized biographies,” a collection of historical miniatures “Humanity’s Finest Hours,” and biographical essays collected in the “Builders of the World” cycle.
He considered himself a citizen of the world. Traveled to all continents, visited Africa, India and both Americas, spoke several languages. Franz Werfel said that Zweig was better prepared than anyone else for life in exile. Among Zweig's acquaintances and friends were almost all European celebrities: writers, artists, politicians. However, he was demonstratively not interested in politics, believing that “in real life, in real life, in the field of action of political forces, it is not outstanding minds, not bearers of pure ideas, that are decisive, but a much baser, but also more dexterous breed - behind-the-scenes figures, people of dubious morality and small intelligence,” like Joseph Fouché, whose biography he wrote. The apolitical Zweig never even went to the polls.
While still a high school student, at the age of 15, Zweig began collecting autographs of writers and composers. Later this hobby became his passion, he owned one of the best collections of manuscripts in the world, including pages written by the hand of Leonardo, Napoleon, Balzac, Mozart, Bach, Nietzsche, personal belongings of Goethe and Beethoven. There were at least 4 thousand catalogs alone.
All this success and brilliance had, however, a downside. In the writing community they caused jealousy and envy. As John Fowles put it, “the silver spoon eventually began to turn into a crucifix.” Brecht, Musil, Canetti, Hesse, Kraus left openly hostile statements about Zweig. Hofmannsthal, one of the organizers of the Salzburg Festival, demanded that Zweig not appear at the festival. The writer bought a house in small, provincial Salzburg during the First World War, long before any festivals, but he respected this agreement and every summer, during the festival, he left the city. Others were not so forthcoming. Thomas Mann, considered the No. 1 German writer, was not too happy about the fact that someone had overtaken him in popularity and sales ratings. And although he wrote about Zweig: “His literary fame penetrated to the most remote corners of the earth. Perhaps, since the time of Erasmus, no writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig,” among those close to him, Mann called him one of the worst modern German writers. True, Mann’s bar was not low: both Feuchtwanger and Remarque ended up in the same company along with Zweig.
"Non-Austrian Austrian, non-Jewish Jew." Zweig really did not feel like either an Austrian or a Jew. He recognized himself as a European and spent his whole life advocating for the creation of a united Europe - an insanely utopian idea in the interwar period, realized several decades after his death.
Zweig said of himself and his parents that they “were Jews only by accident of birth.” Like many successful, assimilated Western Jews, he had a slight disdain for the Ostjuden, the Yiddish-speaking, impoverished people of the Pale of Settlement who followed a traditional lifestyle. When Herzl tried to recruit Zweig to work in the Zionist movement, he flatly refused. In 1935, once in New York, he did not speak out about the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, fearing that this would only worsen their situation. Zweig was condemned for this refusal to use his influence in the fight against growing anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt called him “a bourgeois writer who never cared about the fate of his own people.” In reality, everything was more complicated. Asking himself what nationality he would choose in a united Europe of the future, Zweig admitted that he would prefer to be a Jew, a person with a spiritual rather than a physical homeland.
It is difficult for Zweig's reader to believe the fact that he lived until 1942, survived two world wars, several revolutions and the onset of fascism, and that he traveled all over the world. It seems that his life stopped somewhere in the 20s, if not earlier, and that he had never been outside of Central Europe. The action of almost all of his short stories and novels takes place in the pre-war period, as a rule, in Vienna, less often in some European resorts. It seems that in his work Zweig was trying to escape into the past - into the blessed “golden age of reliability.”
Another way to escape into the past was to study history. Biographies, historical essays and miniatures, reviews and memoirs occupy much more space in Zweig’s creative heritage than the original works - a couple of dozen short stories and two novels. Zweig’s historical interests were not something unusual; all German literature of his time was gripped by a “thirst for history” (critic W. Schmidt-Dengler): Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Emil Ludwig... The era of wars and revolutions required historical understanding. “When such great events take place in history, you don’t want to invent them in art,” said Zweig.
Zweig’s peculiarity is that for him history was reduced to individual, decisive, crisis moments - “finest hours”, “truly historical, great and unforgettable moments.” During such hours, the unknown captain of the engineering forces Rouget de Lisle creates the Marseillaise, the adventurer Vasco Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean, and because of the indecisiveness of Marshal Grouchy, the destinies of Europe change. Zweig celebrated such historical moments in his life. Thus, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for him was symbolized by the meeting on the Swiss border with the train of the last Emperor Charles, who was sending him into exile. He also collected autographs of celebrities for a reason, but looked for those manuscripts that would express a moment of inspiration, the creative insight of a genius, which would allow “to comprehend in the relic of a manuscript what made the immortals immortal for the world.”
Zweig’s short stories are also the stories of one “fantastic night,” “24 hours in the life”: a concentrated moment when the hidden possibilities of the individual, the abilities and passions dormant within him, burst out. Biographies of Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette are stories about how “an ordinary, everyday fate turns into a tragedy on an ancient scale,” the average person turns out to be worthy of greatness. Zweig believed that every person has a certain innate, “demonic” beginning that drives him beyond the boundaries of his own personality, “toward danger, to the unknown, to risk.” It was this breakthrough of the dangerous - or sublime - part of our soul that he loved to depict. He called one of his biographical trilogies “Fighting the Demon”: Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, “Dionysian” natures, completely subordinated to the “power of the demon” and contrasted with the harmonious Olympian Goethe.
Zweig's paradox is the uncertainty of which “literary class” he should be classified as. He considered himself a “serious writer,” but it is obvious that his works are rather high-quality mass literature: melodramatic plots, entertaining biographies celebrities. According to Stephen Spender, Zweig's main readership was teenagers from middle-class European families - they avidly read stories about how, behind the respectable façade of bourgeois society, there were hidden "burning secrets" and passions: sexual attraction, fears, mania and madness. Many of Zweig’s short stories seem to be illustrations of Freud’s research, which is not surprising: they moved in the same circles, described the same respectable and respectable Viennese, who hid a bunch of subconscious complexes under the guise of decency.
For all his brightness and external brilliance, there is something elusive and unclear in Zweig. He was rather a private person. His works cannot be called autobiographical. “Your things are only a third of your personality,” his first wife wrote to him. In Zweig's memoirs, the reader is struck by their strange impersonalism: this is more a biography of an era than of an individual person. Not much can be learned from them about the writer’s personal life. In Zweig's short stories, the figure of the narrator often appears, but he always keeps in the shadows, in the background, performing purely official functions. The writer, oddly enough, gave his own traits to those far from the most pleasant of his characters: the annoying collector of celebrities in “Impatience of the Heart” or the writer in “Letter from a Stranger.” All this rather resembles self-caricature - perhaps unconscious and not even noticed by Zweig himself.
Zweig is generally a writer with a double bottom: if you wish, in his most classic works you can find associations with Kafka - with whom he, it would seem, had nothing in common! Meanwhile, “The Decline of One Heart” is a story about the instantaneous and terrible disintegration of a family - the same as “Metamorphosis,” only without any phantasmagoria, and the discussions about the trial in “Fear” seem borrowed from “The Trial.” Critics have long noticed the similarity of the plot lines of “The Chess Novella” with Nabokov’s “Luzhin.” Well, the famous romantic “Letter from a Stranger” in the era of postmodernism is tempting to be read in the spirit of Priestley’s “An Inspector’s Visit”: a hoax that created a great love story out of several random women.
Zweig's literary fate is a mirror version of the romantic legend about an unrecognized artist, whose talent remained unappreciated by his contemporaries and was recognized only after death. In the case of Zweig, everything turned out exactly the opposite: according to Fowles, “Stephan Zweig experienced, after his death in 1942, the most complete oblivion of any writer of our century.” Fowles, of course, exaggerates: Zweig, even during his lifetime, was not “the most read and translated serious writer in the world,” and his oblivion is far from complete. In at least two countries, Zweig's popularity never waned. These countries are France and, oddly enough, Russia. Why Zweig was so loved in the USSR (his collected works were published in 12 volumes in 1928-1932) is a mystery. The liberal and humanist Zweig had nothing in common with the communists and fellow travelers beloved by the Soviet regime.
Zweig was one of the first to feel the onset of fascism. By a strange coincidence, from the terrace of the writer’s Salzburg house, located near the German border, there was a view of Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer’s favorite residence. In 1934, Zweig left Austria - four years before the Anschluss. The formal pretext was the desire to work in the British archives on the history of Mary Stuart, but deep down he knew that he would not return back.
During these years, he writes about individual idealists, Erasmus and Castellio, who opposed fanaticism and totalitarianism. In Zweig’s contemporary reality, such humanists and liberals could do little.
During the years of emigration, an impeccably happy marriage came to an end. Everything changed with the arrival of the secretary, Charlotte Elizabeth Altman. For several years, Zweig tossed around inside a love triangle, not knowing who to choose: an aging, but still beautiful and elegant wife, or a mistress - a young, but somehow plain-looking, sickly and unhappy girl. The feeling that Zweig felt for Lotte was pity rather than attraction: this pity he endowed with Anton Hofmiller, the hero of his only completed novel, Impatience of the Heart, written at that time. In 1938, the writer finally received a divorce. Once Friederike left her husband for Zweig, now he himself left her for another - this melodramatic plot could well form the basis of one of his short stories. “Internally,” Zweig never completely broke up with his ex-wife; he wrote to her that their breakup was purely external.
Loneliness approached the writer not only in family life. By the beginning of World War II, he was left without spiritual guidance. There is something feminine in Zweig’s talent and personality. The point is not only that the heroines of most of his works are women, but that he was probably one of the most subtle experts on female psychology in world literature. This femininity was manifested in the fact that Zweig was, by nature, more a follower than a leader: he constantly needed a “teacher” whom he could follow. Before the First World War, such a “teacher” for him was Verhaeren, whose poems Zweig translated into German and about whom he wrote memoirs; during the war - Romain Rolland, after it - to some extent Freud. Freud died in 1939. Emptiness surrounded the writer on all sides.
Having lost his homeland, Zweig felt like an Austrian for the first time. In the last years of his life, he writes memoirs - another escape into the past, to Austria at the beginning of the century. Another version of the “Habsburg myth” is nostalgia for the disappeared empire. A myth born of despair - as Joseph Roth said, “but you still have to admit that the Habsburgs are better than Hitler...” Unlike Roth, his close friend, Zweig became neither a Catholic nor a supporter of the imperial dynasty. And yet he created a panegyric full of painful melancholy for the “golden age of reliability”: “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed to be designed for eternity, and the state is the highest guarantor of this constancy. Everything in this vast empire stood firmly and unshakably in its place, and above everything was the old Kaiser. The nineteenth century, in its liberal idealism, was sincerely convinced that it was on the straight and sure path to the “best of all worlds.”
Clive James, in Cultural Amnesia, called Zweig the embodiment of humanism. Franz Werfel said that Zweig's religion was humanistic optimism, faith in the liberal values of his youth. “The darkening of this spiritual sky was a shock for Zweig that he could not bear.” All this is true - it was easier for the writer to die than to come to terms with the collapse of the ideals of his youth. He ends his nostalgic passages dedicated to the liberal age of hope and progress with the characteristic phrase: “But even if it was an illusion, it was still wonderful and noble, more humane and life-giving than today’s ideals. And something deep down in my soul, despite all the experience and disappointment, prevents me from completely renouncing it. I cannot completely renounce the ideals of my youth, the belief that someday again, in spite of everything, a bright day will come.”
Zweig’s farewell letter said: “After sixty, special strength is required to start life anew. My strength is exhausted by years of wandering far from my homeland. In addition, I think that it is better now, with our heads raised, to put an end to an existence whose main joy was intellectual work, and whose highest value was personal freedom. I greet all my friends. Let them see the dawn after a long night! But I’m too impatient and leave before them.”
(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 intriguing paths 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.
Novelist and biographer 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 pushed Zweig to a different activity: he began to translate and publish Werhaeren. 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 an expert on 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 of Feelings” (1929), which included “Fear”, “Street in the Moonlight”, “Sunset of One Heart”, “Fantastic Night” , “Mendel the Bookseller” 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 one of the Nazis either: in 1935, his books were burned in public 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 communicate directly with ordinary people(he, like any foreigner, was carefully watched). 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 applying the link enough?”
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 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 was a real treasure himself 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
Stefan Zweig (German Stefan Zweig - Stefan Zweig; November 28, 1881 - February 23, 1942) - Austrian critic, author of many short stories and fictionalized biographies.
Short story writer, novelist, poet, author literary biographies. Born in Vienna into the family of a wealthy Jewish merchant who owned a textile factory. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he went to London, Paris, traveled to Italy and Spain, visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, and Panama.
The solid condition of the parents allows them to easily publish their first book - “Silver Strings” (1901). Zweig risked sending the first collection of poems to his idol - the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He sent his book in response. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Rilke’s death.
Zweig's short stories - "Amok", "Confusion of Feelings", "Chess Novella" - made the author's name popular all over the world. They amaze with their drama, captivate with unusual plots and make you reflect on the vicissitudes of human destinies. Novels from modern life Zweig generally did not succeed. He understood this and rarely turned to the novel genre. These are “Impatience of the Heart” and “Frenzy of Transfiguration”, published in German for the first time forty years after the author’s death, in 1982.
Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Joseph Fouché, Balzac, and Marie Antoinette. The writer always masterfully worked with documents, discovering a psychological background in any letter or memoir of an eyewitness. This includes the following works “Three Singers of Their Lives” (Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy), “Fighting the Demon” (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche).
In the 20-30s. Many Western writers are becoming increasingly interested in the USSR. They saw in this country the only real force that could resist fascism. Zweig came to the USSR in 1928 for celebrations on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Leo Tolstoy. His attitude towards the Land of the Soviets could then be characterized as benevolently critical curiosity. But over the years, goodwill waned and skepticism grew.
The last years of Zweig's life were years of wandering. He fled from Salzburg, choosing London as his temporary residence. Then he went to Latin America (1940), moved to the USA, but soon decided to settle in the small Brazilian city of Petropolis, located high in the mountains.
Gymnasium, Zweig entered the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy and received his doctorate in 1904.
Already during his studies, he published his first collection of poems at his own expense (“Silberne Saiten”). The poems were written under the influence of Hofmannsthal, as well as Rilke, to whom Zweig risked sending his collection. Rilke sent his book in response. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Rilke’s death.
After graduating from the University of Vienna, Zweig went to London and Paris (), then traveled to Italy and Spain (), visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama (). During the last years of the First World War he lived in Switzerland (-), and after the war he settled near Salzburg.
In 1920, Zweig married Friederike Maria von Winternitz. They divorced in 1938. In 1939, Zweig married his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann.
In 1934, after Hitler came to power in Germany, Zweig left Austria and went to London. In 1940, Zweig and his wife moved to New York, and on August 22, 1940, to Petropolis, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Feeling severely disappointed and depressed, on February 23, 1942, Zweig and his wife took a lethal dose of barbiturates and were found dead in their home, holding hands.
Zweig's home in Brazil was later turned into a museum and is now known as Casa Stefan Zweig. In 1981, an Austrian postage stamp was issued for the 100th anniversary of the writer.
Novels by Stefan Zweig. Novels and biographies
Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Joseph Foucher, Balzac ().
IN historical novels It is customary to conjecture a historical fact using the power of creative imagination. Where documents were lacking, the artist’s imagination began to work. Zweig, on the contrary, always masterfully worked with documents, discovering a psychological background in any letter or memoir of an eyewitness.
"Mary Stuart" (1935), "The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam" (1934)
The dramatic personality and fate of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and France, will always excite the imagination of posterity. The author designated the genre of the book “Maria Stuart” as a novelized biography. The Scottish and English queens have never seen each other. That's what Elizabeth wished. But between them, for a quarter of a century, there was intense correspondence, outwardly correct, but full of hidden jabs and caustic insults. The letters form the basis of the book. Zweig also used the testimony of friends and enemies of both queens to render an impartial verdict on both.
Having completed the life story of the beheaded queen, Zweig indulges in final thoughts: “Morals and politics have their own different paths. Events are assessed differently depending on whether we judge them from the point of view of humanity or from the point of view of political advantages.” For the writer in the early 30s. the conflict between morality and politics is no longer speculative, but quite tangible in nature, affecting him personally.
Heritage
A private charitable organization “Casa Stefan Zweig” was created, with its ultimate goal being the creation of the Stefan Zweig Museum in Petropolis - in the house where he and his wife lived in their last months and passed away.
Materials from the book “Foreign Writers. Biobibliographic Dictionary" (Moscow, "Prosveshcheniye" ("Educational Literature"), 1997)
Selected bibliography
Poetry collections
- "Silver strings" ()
- "Early wreaths" ()
Dramas, tragedies
- "House by the Sea" (tragedy)
- "Jeremiah" ( Jeremias, , dramatic chronicle)
Cycles
- "First experiences: 4 short stories from the land of childhood (At dusk, The Governess, A burning secret, A summer short story) ( Erstes Erlebnis.Vier Geschichten aus Kinderland, 1911)
- "Three Masters: Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky" ( Drei Meister: Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, )
- “The fight against madness: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche” ( Der Kampf mit dem Dämon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, )
- “Three singers of their lives: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy” ( Drei Dichter ihres Lebens, )
- “Psyche and healing: Mesmer, Becker-Eddy, Freud” ()
Novels
- "Conscience against violence: Castellio against Calvin" ( Castellio gegen Calvin oder. Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt, 1936)
- "Amok" (Der Amokläufer, 1922)
- "Letter from a Stranger" ( Brief einer Unbekannten, 1922)
- "Invisible Collection" ()
- "Confusion of feelings" ( Verwirrung der Gefühle, )
- "Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman" ()
- “The Finest Hours of Humanity” (in the first Russian translation - Fatal Moments) (cycle of short stories)
- "Mendel the Bookseller" ()
- "The Burning Secret" (Brennendes Geheimnis, 1911)
- "At Twilight"
- "Woman and Nature"
- "One Heart's Sunset"
- "Fantastic Night"
- "Street in the Moonlight"
- "Summer Novella"
- « Last holiday»
- "Fear"
- "Leporella"
- "Irreversible moment"
- "Stolen Manuscripts"
- "The Governess" (Die Gouvernante, 1911)
- "Compulsion"
- "An Incident on Lake Geneva"
- "Byron's Mystery"
- “An unexpected acquaintance with a new profession”
- "Arturo Toscanini"
- "Christine" (Rausch der Verwandlung, 1982)
- "Clarissa" (unfinished)
Legends
- "The Legend of the Twin Sisters"
- "Lyon Legend"
- "The Legend of the Third Dove"
- "Eyes of the Eternal Brother" ()
Novels
- "Impatience of the Heart" ( Ungeduld des Herzens, )
- "Frenzy of Transfiguration" ( Rausch der Verwandlung, , in Russian lane () - "Christina Hoflener")
Fictionalized biographies, biographies
- "France Maserel" ( Frans Maserel, ; with Arthur Holicher)
- "Marie Antoinette: a portrait of an ordinary character" ( Marie Antoinette, )
- "The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam" ()
- "Mary Stuart" ( Maria Stuart, )
- "Conscience against violence: Castellio against Calvin" ()
- "The Feat of Magellan" ("Magellan. Man and His Deeds") ()
- "Balzac" ( Balzac, published posthumously)
- “Amerigo. The Tale of a Historical Mistake"
- "Joseph Fouche. Portrait of a politician"
Autobiography
- "Yesterday's World: Memoirs of a European" ( Die Welt von gestern, published posthumously)
Articles, essays
- "Fire"
- "Dickens"
- "Dante"
- "Speech for Romain Rolland's sixtieth birthday"
- “Speech on the sixtieth birthday of Maxim Gorky”
- “The meaning and beauty of manuscripts (Speech on book exhibition in London)"
- “A book is a gateway to the world”
- "Nietzsche"
Film adaptations
- 24 hours in the life of a woman (Germany) - film adaptation of the short story of the same name, directed by Robert Land.
- The Burning Secret (Germany) - a film adaptation of the short story of the same name, directed by Robert Siodmak.
- Amok (France) - film adaptation of the short story of the same name, directed by Fyodor Otsep.
- Beware of Pity () - film adaptation of the novel “Impatience of the Heart”, directed by Maurice Elway.
- Letter from a Stranger () - based on the short story of the same name, directed by Max Ophüls.
- Chess novella () - based on the novella of the same name, by German director Gerd Oswald.
- Dangerous Pity () - a two-part film by French film director Edouard Molinaro, an adaptation of the novel “Impatience of the Heart.”
- Confusion of Feelings () is a film by Belgian director Etienne Perrier based on Zweig's novel of the same name.
- Burning Secret () - a film directed by Andrew Birkin, which received prizes at the Brussels and Venice Film Festivals.
- Hop of Transfiguration (film, 1989) - a two-part film based on the unfinished work “Christine Hoflener”, directed by Edouard Molinaro,.
- The Last Holiday is a film based on the short story of the same name.
- Clarissa () - television film, film adaptation of the short story of the same name, directed by Jacques Deray.
- Letter from a stranger () - last film French film director Jacques Deray
- 24 hours in the life of a woman () - a film by French director Laurent Bunic, a film adaptation of the short story of the same name.
- Love for love () - a film directed by Sergei Ashkenazy based on the novel “Impatience of the Heart”
- The Promise () is a melodrama directed by Patrice Lecomte, a film adaptation of the short story “Journey to the Past.”
- The film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was shot based on the works. In the final credits of the film it is indicated that its plot is inspired by the works of the author (the filmmakers mention such works as “Impatience of the Heart”, “Yesterday’s World. Notes of a European”, “Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman”).
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- Art. Zweig (ZhZL)
Excerpt characterizing Zweig, Stefan
– Voila un veritable ami! - said the beaming Helen, once again touching Bilibip’s sleeve with her hand. – Mais c"est que j"aime l"un et l"autre, je ne voudrais pas leur faire de chagrin. Je donnerais ma vie pour leur bonheur a tous deux, [Here is a true friend! But I love both of them and I wouldn’t want to upset anyone. For the happiness of both, I would be ready to sacrifice my life.] - she said.Bilibin shrugged his shoulders, expressing that even he could no longer help such grief.
“Une maitresse femme! Voila ce qui s"appelle poser carrement la question. Elle voudrait epouser tous les trois a la fois", ["Well done woman! That's what is called firmly asking the question. She would like to be the wife of all three at the same time."] - thought Bilibin.
- But tell me, how will your husband look at this matter? - he said, due to the strength of his reputation, not afraid to undermine himself with such a naive question. – Will he agree?
- Ah! “Il m"aime tant! - said Helen, who for some reason thought that Pierre loved her too. - Il fera tout pour moi. [Ah! he loves me so much! He is ready for anything for me.]
Bilibin picked up the skin to represent the mot being prepared.
“Meme le divorce, [Even for a divorce.],” he said.
Helen laughed.
Among the people who allowed themselves to doubt the legality of the marriage being undertaken was Helen’s mother, Princess Kuragina. She was constantly tormented by envy of her daughter, and now, when the object of envy was closest to the princess’s heart, she could not come to terms with this thought. She consulted with a Russian priest about the extent to which divorce and marriage was possible while her husband was alive, and the priest told her that this was impossible, and, to her joy, pointed her to the Gospel text, which (it seemed to the priest) directly rejected the possibility of marriage from a living husband.
Armed with these arguments, which seemed irrefutable to her, the princess went to see her daughter early in the morning, in order to find her alone.
After listening to her mother's objections, Helen smiled meekly and mockingly.
“But it’s directly said: whoever marries a divorced wife...” said the old princess.
- Ah, maman, ne dites pas de betises. Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma position j"ai des devoirs, [Ah, mamma, don’t talk nonsense. You don’t understand anything. My position has responsibilities.] - Helen spoke, translating the conversation into French from Russian, in which she always seemed to have some kind of ambiguity in her case.
- But, my friend...
– Ah, maman, comment est ce que vous ne comprenez pas que le Saint Pere, qui a le droit de donner des dispenses... [Ah, mamma, how don’t you understand that the Holy Father, who has the power of absolution...]
At this time, the lady companion who lived with Helen came in to report to her that His Highness was in the hall and wanted to see her.
- Non, dites lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse contre lui, parce qu"il m"a manque parole. [No, tell him that I don’t want to see him, that I’m furious against him because he didn’t keep his word to me.]
“Comtesse a tout peche misericorde, [Countess, mercy for every sin.],” said a young blond man with a long face and nose as he entered.
The old princess stood up respectfully and sat down. The young man who entered did not pay attention to her. The princess nodded her head to her daughter and floated towards the door.
“No, she’s right,” thought the old princess, all her convictions were destroyed before the appearance of His Highness. - She is right; but how is it that we didn’t know this in our irrevocable youth? And it was so simple,” the old princess thought as she got into the carriage.
At the beginning of August, Helen's matter was completely determined, and she wrote a letter to her husband (who loved her very much, as she thought) in which she informed him of her intention to marry NN and that she had joined the one true religion and that she asks him to complete all the formalities necessary for divorce, which the bearer of this letter will convey to him.
“Sur ce je prie Dieu, mon ami, de vous avoir sous sa sainte et puissante garde. Votre amie Helene.”
[“Then I pray to God that you, my friend, will be under his holy, strong protection. Your friend Elena"]
This letter was brought to Pierre's house while he was on the Borodino field.
The second time, already at the end of the Battle of Borodino, having escaped from Raevsky’s battery, Pierre with crowds of soldiers headed along the ravine to Knyazkov, reached the dressing station and, seeing blood and hearing screams and moans, hastily moved on, getting mixed up in the crowds of soldiers.
One thing that Pierre now wanted with all the strength of his soul was to quickly get out of those terrible impressions in which he lived that day, return to normal living conditions and fall asleep peacefully in his room on his bed. Only under ordinary conditions of life did he feel that he would be able to understand himself and all that he had seen and experienced. But these ordinary living conditions were nowhere to be found.
Although cannonballs and bullets did not whistle here along the road along which he walked, on all sides there was the same thing that was there on the battlefield. There were the same suffering, exhausted and sometimes strangely indifferent faces, the same blood, the same soldiers' greatcoats, the same sounds of shooting, although distant, but still terrifying; In addition, it was stuffy and dusty.
Having walked about three miles along the big Mozhaisk road, Pierre sat down on the edge of it.
Dusk fell on the ground, and the roar of the guns died down. Pierre, leaning on his arm, lay down and lay there for a long time, looking at the shadows moving past him in the darkness. It constantly seemed to him that a cannonball was flying at him with a terrible whistle; he shuddered and stood up. He didn't remember how long he had been here. In the middle of the night, three soldiers, having brought branches, placed themselves next to him and began to make a fire.
The soldiers, looking sideways at Pierre, lit a fire, put a pot on it, crumbled crackers into it and put lard in it. The pleasant smell of edible and fatty food merged with the smell of smoke. Pierre stood up and sighed. The soldiers (there were three of them) ate, not paying attention to Pierre, and talked among themselves.
- What kind of person will you be? - one of the soldiers suddenly turned to Pierre, obviously, by this question meaning what Pierre was thinking, namely: if you want something, we will give it to you, just tell me, are you an honest person?
- I? me?.. - said Pierre, feeling the need to belittle his social position as much as possible in order to be closer and more understandable to the soldiers. “I am truly a militia officer, only my squad is not here; I came to the battle and lost my own.
- Look! - said one of the soldiers.
The other soldier shook his head.
- Well, eat the mess if you want! - said the first and gave Pierre, licking it, a wooden spoon.
Pierre sat down by the fire and began to eat the mess, the food that was in the pot and which seemed to him the most delicious of all the foods that he had ever eaten. While he greedily bent over the pot, picking up large spoons, chewing one after another and his face was visible in the light of the fire, the soldiers silently looked at him.
-Where do you want it? You tell me! – one of them asked again.
– I’m going to Mozhaisk.
- Are you now a master?
- Yes.
- What’s your name?
- Pyotr Kirillovich.
- Well, Pyotr Kirillovich, let’s go, we’ll take you. In complete darkness, the soldiers, together with Pierre, went to Mozhaisk.
The roosters were already crowing when they reached Mozhaisk and began to climb the steep city mountain. Pierre walked along with the soldiers, completely forgetting that his inn was below the mountain and that he had already passed it. He would not have remembered this (he was in such a state of loss) if his guard, who went to look for him around the city and returned back to his inn, had not encountered him halfway up the mountain. The bereitor recognized Pierre by his hat, which was turning white in the darkness.
“Your Excellency,” he said, “we are already desperate.” Why are you walking? Where are you going, please?
“Oh yes,” said Pierre.
The soldiers paused.
- Well, have you found yours? - said one of them.
- Well, goodbye! Pyotr Kirillovich, I think? Farewell, Pyotr Kirillovich! - said other voices.
“Goodbye,” said Pierre and headed with his driver to the inn.
“We have to give it to them!” - Pierre thought, taking his pocket. “No, don’t,” a voice told him.
There was no room in the upper rooms of the inn: everyone was occupied. Pierre went into the yard and, covering his head, lay down in his carriage.
As soon as Pierre laid his head on the pillow, he felt that he was falling asleep; but suddenly, with the clarity of almost reality, a boom, boom, boom of shots was heard, groans, screams, the splashing of shells were heard, the smell of blood and gunpowder, and a feeling of horror, the fear of death, overwhelmed him. He opened his eyes in fear and raised his head from under his overcoat. Everything was quiet in the yard. Only at the gate, talking to the janitor and splashing through the mud, was some orderly walking. Above Pierre's head, under the dark underside of the plank canopy, doves fluttered from the movement he made while rising. Throughout the yard there was a peaceful, joyful for Pierre at that moment, strong smell of an inn, the smell of hay, manure and tar. Between two black canopies a clear starry sky was visible.
“Thank God this isn’t happening anymore,” thought Pierre, covering his head again. - Oh, how terrible fear is and how shamefully I surrendered to it! And they... they were firm and calm all the time, until the end... - he thought. In Pierre's concept, they were soldiers - those who were at the battery, and those who fed him, and those who prayed to the icon. They - these strange ones, hitherto unknown to him, were clearly and sharply separated in his thoughts from all other people.
“To be a soldier, just a soldier! - thought Pierre, falling asleep. – Enter into this common life with your whole being, imbued with what makes them so. But how can one throw off all this unnecessary, devilish, all the burden of this external man? At one time I could have been this. I could run away from my father as much as I wanted. Even after the duel with Dolokhov, I could have been sent as a soldier.” And in Pierre’s imagination flashed a dinner at a club, at which he called Dolokhov, and a benefactor in Torzhok. And now Pierre is presented with a ceremonial dining room. This lodge takes place in the English Club. And someone familiar, close, dear, sits at the end of the table. Yes it is! This is a benefactor. “But he died? - thought Pierre. - Yes, he died; but I didn't know he was alive. And how sorry I am that he died, and how glad I am that he is alive again!” On one side of the table sat Anatole, Dolokhov, Nesvitsky, Denisov and others like him (the category of these people was as clearly defined in Pierre’s soul in the dream as the category of those people whom he called them), and these people, Anatole, Dolokhov they shouted and sang loudly; but from behind their shout the voice of the benefactor could be heard, speaking incessantly, and the sound of his words was as significant and continuous as the roar of the battlefield, but it was pleasant and comforting. Pierre did not understand what the benefactor was saying, but he knew (the category of thoughts was just as clear in the dream) that the benefactor was talking about goodness, about the possibility of being what they were. And they surrounded the benefactor on all sides, with their simple, kind, firm faces. But although they were kind, they did not look at Pierre, did not know him. Pierre wanted to attract their attention and say. He stood up, but at the same moment his legs became cold and exposed.
He felt ashamed, and he covered his legs with his hand, from which the greatcoat actually fell off. For a moment, Pierre, straightening his overcoat, opened his eyes and saw the same awnings, pillars, courtyard, but all this was now bluish, light and covered with sparkles of dew or frost.
“It’s dawning,” thought Pierre. - But that’s not it. I need to listen to the end and understand the words of the benefactor.” He covered himself with his overcoat again, but neither the dining box nor the benefactor was there. There were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that someone said or Pierre himself thought about.
Pierre, later recalling these thoughts, despite the fact that they were caused by the impressions of that day, was convinced that someone outside himself was telling them to him. Never, it seemed to him, had he been able to think and express his thoughts like that in reality.
“War is the most difficult task of subordinating human freedom to the laws of God,” said the voice. – Simplicity is submission to God; you can't escape him. And they are simple. They don't say it, but they do it. The spoken word is silver, and the unspoken word is golden. A person cannot own anything while he is afraid of death. And whoever is not afraid of her belongs to him everything. If there were no suffering, a person would not know his own boundaries, would not know himself. The most difficult thing (Pierre continued to think or hear in his sleep) is to be able to unite in his soul the meaning of everything. Connect everything? - Pierre said to himself. - No, don't connect. You can’t connect thoughts, but connecting all these thoughts is what you need! Yes, we need to pair, we need to pair! - Pierre repeated to himself with inner delight, feeling that with these words, and only with these words, what he wants to express is expressed, and the whole question tormenting him is resolved.
- Yes, we need to mate, it’s time to mate.
- We need to harness, it’s time to harness, your Excellency! Your Excellency,” a voice repeated, “we need to harness, it’s time to harness...
It was the voice of the bereitor waking Pierre. The sun hit Pierre's face directly. He looked at the dirty inn, in the middle of which, near a well, soldiers were watering thin horses, from which carts were driving through the gate. Pierre turned away in disgust and, closing his eyes, hastily fell back onto the seat of the carriage. “No, I don’t want this, I don’t want to see and understand this, I want to understand what was revealed to me during my sleep. One more second and I would have understood everything. So what should I do? Pair, but how to combine everything?” And Pierre felt with horror that the entire meaning of what he saw and thought in his dream was destroyed.
The driver, the coachman and the janitor told Pierre that an officer had arrived with the news that the French had moved towards Mozhaisk and that ours were leaving.
Pierre got up and, ordering them to lay down and catch up with him, went on foot through the city.
The troops left and left about ten thousand wounded. These wounded were visible in the courtyards and windows of houses and crowded in the streets. On the streets near the carts that were supposed to take away the wounded, screams, curses and blows were heard. Pierre gave the carriage that had overtaken him to a wounded general he knew and went with him to Moscow. Dear Pierre learned about the death of his brother-in-law and about the death of Prince Andrei.
X
On the 30th, Pierre returned to Moscow. Almost at the outpost he met Count Rastopchin's adjutant.
“And we are looking for you everywhere,” said the adjutant. “The Count definitely needs to see you.” He asks you to come to him now on a very important matter.
Pierre, without stopping home, took a cab and went to the commander-in-chief.
Count Rastopchin had just arrived in the city this morning from his country dacha in Sokolniki. The hallway and reception room in the count's house were full of officials who appeared at his request or for orders. Vasilchikov and Platov had already met with the count and explained to him that it was impossible to defend Moscow and that it would be surrendered. Although this news was hidden from the residents, officials and heads of various departments knew that Moscow would be in the hands of the enemy, just as Count Rostopchin knew it; and all of them, in order to relinquish responsibility, came to the commander-in-chief with questions about how to deal with the units entrusted to them.
While Pierre was entering the reception room, a courier coming from the army was leaving the count.
The courier hopelessly waved his hand at the questions addressed to him and walked through the hall.
While waiting in the reception area, Pierre looked with tired eyes at the various officials, old and young, military and civilian, important and unimportant, who were in the room. Everyone seemed unhappy and restless. Pierre approached one group of officials, in which one was his acquaintance. After greeting Pierre, they continued their conversation.
- How to deport and return again, there will be no trouble; and in such a situation one cannot be held accountable for anything.
“Why, here he is writing,” said another, pointing to the printed paper he was holding in his hand.
- That's another matter. This is necessary for the people,” said the first.
- What is this? asked Pierre.
- Here's a new poster.
Pierre took it in his hands and began to read:
“The Most Serene Prince, in order to quickly unite with the troops that were coming to him, crossed Mozhaisk and stood in a strong place where the enemy would not suddenly attack him. Forty-eight cannons with shells were sent to him from here, and His Serene Highness says that he will defend Moscow to the last drop of blood and is ready to fight even in the streets. You, brothers, don’t look at the fact that public offices have been closed: things need to be tidied up, and we will deal with the villain in our court! When it comes down to it, I need young people from both towns and villages. I’ll call the cry in two days, but now there’s no need, I’m silent. Good with an axe, not bad with a spear, but best of all is a three-piece pitchfork: a Frenchman is not heavier than a sheaf of rye. Tomorrow, after lunch, I’m taking Iverskaya to the Catherine Hospital, to see the wounded. We will consecrate the water there: they will recover sooner; and now I’m healthy: my eye hurt, but now I can see both.”
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