Zweig biography of Michelangelo. Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig is one of the most popular Austrian writers in the world. His short stories about love captivate the reader from the first arcs, generously bestowing the joy of recognition and empathy. He wrote so heartfeltly about love not only because he was talented, but also because he loved. There was a great and bright love in his life, but one day he abandoned it in order to regain his youth. He was wrong: it turned out that this is only possible in fairy tales...
Corypheus of the bride
Stefan Zweig was born on November 28, 1881 in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family of a successful manufacturer and the daughter of a banker.
After graduating from high school in 1900, Stefan entered the Faculty of Philology at the University of Vienna. Already during his studies, he published a collection of his poems, “Silver Strings,” at his own expense.
After graduating from the university and receiving his doctorate, Zweig led the life of a traveler for several years, full of events, cities and countries: Europe and India, “Foggy Albion” and North Africa, both Americas and Indochina... These travels and communication with many outstanding people - poets, writers , artists, philosophers - allowed Zweig to become an expert on European and world culture, a man of encyclopedic knowledge.
...Despite the success of his own poetry collection and, most importantly, poetic translations, Zweig decided that poetry was not his path, and began to seriously study prose. The very first works that came out from Zweig’s pen attracted attention with their subtle psychologism, entertaining plot, and lightness of style. He grabbed the reader from the first page and did not let go until the end, leading him along the intriguing paths of human destinies.
Over the years, the writer's voice has strengthened and acquired an individual flavor. Zweig writes tragedies, dramas, legends, essays, but he feels most comfortable in the genres of short stories and historical biographies. It is they who bring him first European and then world fame...
"I met you…"
...In general, their acquaintance was a matter of chance: the range of interests and, most importantly, communication, the son of a wealthy bourgeois and the lady from the circle of the serving aristocracy are different. And yet they found one point of contact - a passion for literature.
This happened in one of the ordinary small Viennese cafes, where writers and their fans loved to gather.
Friederike Maria von Winternitz, the wife of a Kaiser official, an exemplary mother of two daughters, a young but serious woman, sat modestly with a friend at a table in the corner. And in the center were two men, one of them - slender, smartly dressed, with an evenly trimmed mustache and fashionable pince-nez - kept glancing at Friederike. And he even smiled tenderly at her a couple of times.
Shortly before this, a friend gave Friederike a volume of Verhaeren's poems translated by Zweig. And now, carefully pointing to the smiling dandy, she said: “Look, there’s our translator!”
A day later, Stefan Zweig received a letter signed “FMFW”. It began like this: “Dear Mr. Zweig! Do I need to explain why I so easily decide to do something that people consider indecent... Yesterday in a cafe you and I were sitting not far from each other. On the table in front of me lay a volume of Verhaeren’s poems in your translation. Before that, I read one of your short stories and sonnets. Their sounds still haunt me... I don’t ask you to answer, but if you still want to, write after restante..."
She sent the letter, in general, not expecting anything. Nevertheless, at first a polite, non-binding correspondence ensued. Then they started calling each other. And finally, at one of the musical evenings, Zweig and Friederike met in person.
Compared to his handsome, handsome husband (who cheated on her right and left), but who was generally an ordinary official, Stefan was a special man for Friederike. She realized this very quickly. But Friederike also turned out to be for Zweig an unusual woman, in her he felt a kindred spirit.
They continued to meet and correspond, and in one of the next messages Stefan proposed marriage to her... Friederike did not hesitate for long and, with great difficulty, getting rid of her marriage to her official, she soon became the wife of Stefan Zweig.
And then the First World War began...
Games of mind and love
Their marriage turned out to be a happy union of two creative natures: Fritzi, as Stefan called her, also turned out to be a capable writer.
The couple was briefly separated by the war; Having reunited, they lived in Switzerland for two years, and then settled in Salzburg - in an old house on Mount Kapuzinerberg.
The Zweigs lived in love, harmony and creativity; They didn’t spend much on themselves, they avoided luxury, they didn’t even have a car. Their days were most often spent communicating with friends and acquaintances, and they worked at night, when nothing interfered.
In their home they received many representatives of the European intellectual elite: Thomas Mann, Paul Valery, Joyce, Paganini, Freud, Gorky, Rodin, Rolland, Rilke...
Zweig was rich, successful, he was a real favorite of fate. But not all rich people are generous and compassionate. And Zweig was just like that: he always helped his colleagues, even paid some monthly rent, and literally saved the lives of many. In Vienna, he gathered young poets around him, listened, gave advice and treated them to cafes.
...For two decades, Zweig and Friederike were practically inseparable, and if they separated for several days, they would certainly exchange tender letters. Creative family: she is the author of several stories and novels that were successful in Austria, he is a world famous writer, they lived in happiness and prosperity, enjoying love and creativity. But one day everything changed...
In search of eternal youth
Contemporaries noted the writer’s special sensitivity and his tendency to depression. Zweig, a man with a very subtle psychological structure, turned out to have a very strong complex: he was panicky, terribly afraid of old age.
...One evening Stefan and Friederike went to wander the streets of Salzburg. A couple was walking towards them: an old man leaning heavily on a stick, and a young girl carefully supporting him, who kept repeating: “Be careful, grandfather!” Stefan later told his wife:
How disgusting old age is! I wouldn't want to live to see her. However, if next to this ruin there was not a granddaughter, but just a young woman, who knows... The recipe for eternal youth remains the same for all times: an old man can only borrow it from a young woman in love with him...
In November 1931, Zweig turns 50 years old. He is at the peak of literary fame, he has a beloved wife - and suddenly he falls into a terrible depression. Zweig writes to one of his friends: “I am not afraid of anything - failure, oblivion, loss of money, even death. But I’m afraid of illness, old age and addiction.”
Friederika, apparently not understanding his fears and experiences, decided to “facilitate” the creative process for him: carried away by her own literary work, she hired a secretary-typist for Stefan. 26-year-old Polish Jew Charlotte Altman - thin, stooped, ugly, with a face of some unhealthy color, in general, a very pitiful creature - timidly appeared in their house and modestly took her rightful place.
She turned out to be an excellent secretary, and the fact that this timid plain girl looked at Stefan with loving eyes from the first day of work did not bother Fryderika at all. She is not the first, she is not the last.
But Stefan... It’s mind boggling! Stefan, who is over 50, who during their many years of marriage has never looked at another woman... What is this? And when I heard: “Please understand, Lotte is like a gift of fate for me, like hope for a miracle...”, I remembered the old man and the girl and understood everything.
But, apparently, Zweig himself did not fully believe in this miracle. For several years he tossed around inside love triangle, not knowing who to choose: an aging, but still beautiful and elegant wife, and also a colleague in literary creativity, or a mistress - a young, but some kind of homely, sick and unhappy girl, from whom he expected a miracle of the return of youth. The feeling that Zweig felt for Lotte can hardly be called attraction, much less love - rather, it was pity.
And, despite the fact that he finally received a divorce, “internally” Zweig never completely parted with ex-wife: “Dear Fritzi!.. In my heart I have nothing but sadness from this breakup, external only, which is not at all an internal breakup... I know you will be sad without me. But you don't have much to lose. I have become different, tired of people, and only work makes me happy. Better times have sunk irrevocably, and we survived them together...”
Epiphany and recognition
Zweig and his young wife emigrated first to England, then to the USA, then Brazil followed.
Stefan, as in the old days, often wrote to Friederike. The nature of the letters, of course, was completely different than in the past. Now he is interested in all the little things, all the details of her life, if necessary, he is ready to help. He wrote sparingly about himself: “I read, work, walk with a small dog. Life here is quite comfortable, people are friendly. Small donkeys are grazing on the lawn in front of the house...”
And suddenly in one of the letters the phrase: “Fate cannot be deceived, King David did not come out of me. It’s over - I’m no longer a lover.” And in the next letter - as an admission of his mistake, as a plea for forgiveness: “All my thoughts are with you...”
...There, far from his beloved Europe, from his friends, Zweig finally broke down. His letters to Friederike show more and more bitterness and despondency: “I continue my work; but only 1/4 of my strength. This is just an old habit without any creativity...” In fact, “1/4 of my strength” meant passionate, earnest work, he wrote a lot, like an obsessed person, as if he wanted to forget himself, to escape from depression, to drown out pain and bitterness with work. A novelized biography of Magellan, the novel “Impatience of the Heart”, a book of memoirs “Yesterday’s World”, the manuscript of a major book about Balzac, on which he worked for almost 30 years!..
“For freedom, to the end!..”
The mid-1930s in Europe was filled with important and alarming events: German fascism was raising its head and gaining muscle. But Zweig, who hated the war, did not find himself willing to actively participate in opposing its preparations. However, the entire Western civilization could not or did not want to stop Hitler’s advance. The cult of violence and chaos turned out to be more powerful than the forces of reason, humanity and progress. But, unlike civilization, the writer could run away, emigrate - at least, at least outwardly.
...From the mountain house in the Brazilian resort town of Petropolis on February 23, 1942, no one came out for breakfast. When the doors did not open even at noon, the concerned servants called the police. Stefan Zweig and his wife Charlotte were found carefully dressed on the bed in the room. They slept. We slept forever.
They voluntarily died after taking a large dose of Veronal. Next to them, on the desk, are 13 farewell letters.
Justifying her action, Charlotte wrote that death would be liberation for Stefan, and for her too, because she was tormented by asthma. Zweig was more eloquent: “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 sunrise after a long night. I’m too impatient and go out to meet him first.”
Friederike Zweig wrote: “I’m tired of everything...”
Afterword to life
Frederica and her daughters settled in the United States, in New York.
One early February morning, she sat thoughtfully at her desk in front of a piece of paper on which was written: “Dear Stefan!” She finally decided to talk frankly with the one she loved so much: to tell how empty and lonely she felt without him, to convince him that since his young (and not loved by him) wife had failed to restore his youth to him, then perhaps he we should return to her that old age is not so terrible if it is old age together, because they could...
...The daughter entered the room:
- Mom... Look... - and put a newspaper on the table, on the front page of which there was a huge headline: “The suicide of Stefan Zweig.”
Friederike shuddered, her soul shrank into a ball from the terrible cold that gripped her, and her heart, trembling in anguish, with its interrupted rhythm stubbornly said that Stefan was mistaken this time too...
Stefan Zweig. Born November 28, 1881 in Vienna - died February 23, 1942 in Brazil. Austrian critic, writer, author of many short stories and fictionalized biographies.
Father, Moritz Zweig (1845-1926), owned a textile factory.
Mother, Ida Brettauer (1854-1938), came from a family of Jewish bankers.
Little is known about the childhood and adolescence of the future writer: he himself spoke about it rather sparingly, emphasizing that at the beginning of his life everything was exactly the same as that of other European intellectuals of the turn of the century. After graduating from high school in 1900, 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” (Silberne Saiten), 1901). 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 in 1926.
After graduating from the University of Vienna, Zweig went to London and Paris (1905), then traveled to Italy and Spain (1906), visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama (1912).
Last years During the First World War he lived in Switzerland (1917-1918), 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 created and developed in detail his own model of the novella, different from the works of generally recognized masters of the short genre. The events of most of his stories take place during travels, sometimes exciting, sometimes tiring, and sometimes truly dangerous. Everything that happens to the heroes lies in wait for them along the way, during short stops or short breaks from the road. Dramas play out in a matter of hours, but these are always the main moments of life, when personality is tested and the ability to self-sacrifice is tested. The core of each Zweig story is a monologue that the hero utters in a state of passion.
Zweig's short stories are a kind of summary of novels. But when he tried to develop a separate event into a spatial narrative, his novels turned into drawn-out, wordy short stories. Therefore, 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” (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1938) and “Frenzy of Transfiguration” (Rausch der Verwandlung) - an unfinished novel, first published in German forty years after the author’s death in 1982 (in Russian translation “Christina Hoflener ", 1985).
Zweig often wrote at the intersection of document and art, creating fascinating biographies of Magellan, Mary Stuart, Joseph Fouche (1940).
IN historical novels it is customary to speculate historical fact 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.
Novels by Stefan Zweig:
"Conscience Against Violence: Castellio versus Calvin" (1936)
"Amok" (Der Amokläufer, 1922)
“Letter from a Stranger” (Brief einer Unbekannten, 1922)
"The Invisible Collection" (1926)
"Confusion of Feelings" (Verwirrung der Gefühle, 1927)
"Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman" (1927)
“Star Hours of Humanity” (in the first Russian translation - Fatal Moments) (cycle of short stories, 1927)
"Mendel the Bookseller" (1929)
"Chess Novella" (1942)
"The Burning Secret" (Brennendes Geheimnis, 1911)
"At Twilight"
"Woman and Nature"
"One Heart's Sunset"
"Fantastic Night"
"Street in the Moonlight"
"Summer Novella"
"The 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)
Zatonsky D.
Stefan Zweig, or the Atypically Typical Austrian
Zatonsky D. Artistic landmarks of the 20th century
http: //www.gumer.info/bibliotekBuks/Literat/zaton/07.php
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 played 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 does not exactly ignore this historical fact. He only takes his hero in special moments that are so key to his own worldview: perhaps when he - really alone - stands on the rostrum of the Reichstag and throws his “no” to war in the face of a hall heated with chauvinist hatred; or maybe a second before death, for everyone, even the tribune of the people, dies alone...
And Liebknecht, artificially isolated from the mass of like-minded people, thinking only about it, about the masses, shouts out “the great, red word.” Even those Zweigian heroes who actually found themselves alone are not opposed to society. On the contrary, they are social in their own way.
Zweig's novella does not seem to agree with this. Her characters are not occupied with the world, humanity, progress, but only with themselves or those people with whom private life brings them together, its crossroads, incidents, passions. In “The Burning Secret” we have before us a child who for the first time encounters the alien, selfish world of adults. In the "Summer Novella" he is an elderly man who writes mystifying letters to a young girl and unexpectedly falls in love with her. In “Fear”, this is a woman who started a boring affair, which turns into blackmail and horror for her, but ends in reconciliation with her husband. In “Amoka” there is an unsociable doctor who is approached by a patient, a beautiful colonial lady, endowed with will and pride; he misunderstood his role and his duty, so it all ends in her death and his atoning suicide. In “A Fantastic Night” there is a certain baron-flaneur who, because of his own stupid joke, suddenly begins to see the world differently, looks into its languid depths and becomes different himself. In "The Sunset of One Heart" - an old businessman who found his daughter leaving his neighbor's room in the morning; Formerly a slave to the family, he loses his taste for making money, even his taste for life. In "Leporella" - an ugly maid, so devoted to her frivolous master that she poisoned her mistress and threw herself from the bridge when the frightened widower left her place.
Zweig's short stories captivate readers to this day, especially such first-class ones as “Letter from a Stranger” or “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.” Amok is often 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. Travels took him literary activity to the benefit: without them, probably, neither “Humanity’s Finest Hours,” nor “Magellan” (1937), nor “Amerigo” (1942) would have been born, and in general the idea of a single humanity would perhaps have been 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 to a lost person- from a 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 at will, instead of eyes closed deceive your husband in his own arms.” 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 artistic biographies, so popular now thanks to the books of Y. Tynyanov, A. Maurois, A. Vinogradov, V. Yan, 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. Kizer, - the era feels its dependence on the general course of history (and this feeling is always intensified under the influence of destructive rather than creative forces), the more urgent is the interest in historical figures and events" 6.
In particular, the genre of artistic biography flourished. In the collective work “Austrian Literature of the Thirties” 7 a special section is dedicated to him, where dozens of names and titles are collected. So Zweig's books of this genre had a very broad background. True, Zweig stood out in it. And above all, by the fact that his artistic biographies are not limited to the boundaries of the interwar twenty years - neither chronologically nor in terms of success with the reader. “Verlaine” was written back in 1905, “Balzac” - in 1909, “Verhaerne” - in 1910. These were not Zweig's best works, and today they are almost forgotten. But Zweig’s biographies of the 20s and 30s have not been forgotten. However, their background at that time was almost completely washed away by time. There is no doubt, for the most part it was made up of secondary authors and books, and even those that arose from “soil-based”, pro-Nazi tendencies. There were, however, exceptions. For example, the famous Emil Ludwig, who was in no way inferior to Zweig in fame. He wrote about Goethe, Balzac and Demel, about Beethoven and Weber, about Napoleon, Lincoln, Bismarck, Simon Bolivar, Wilhelm II, Hindenburg and Roosevelt; he did not even ignore Jesus Christ. However, today 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 depiction of the private lives of fictional figures seems to him 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 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, tortuosity, paradoxicality of paths is emphasized human history. 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 rushed with his guard of stormtroopers into Catholic churches... He forms the Jungfolk from street boys, he recruits crowds of children so that during divine services they fly into cathedrals and disrupt the service with screams, squeals, and laughter...” Modern allusions are naked; 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 are again faced with something unusual for Zweig negative hero. 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 the one new concept realism, which refuses to see its essence in empirical life-likeness, but seeks 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 general 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 the book "Hofmannsthal and His Time" (1951) - outlined the Austrian theatrical and literary life 10s as a “fun 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.
Years of life: from 11/28/1881 to 02/22/1942
Austrian writer, critic, biographer. Known primarily as a master of short stories and fictionalized biographies.
Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna into the family of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy owner of a textile factory; the writer's mother came from a family of bankers. Little is known about Zweig’s childhood and adolescence; he himself did not like to talk about this topic, emphasizing that his childhood was ordinary for a Jewish boy. In 1900, Zweig graduated from high school and entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Already during his studies, he published his first collection of poems, “Silver Strings” (Silberne Saiten, 1901), at his own expense. Zweig took the risk of sending the book to Rilke, and he in return sent him a book of his poems, and so a friendship began between them that lasted until Rilke’s death in 1926. Zweig graduated from the University of Vienna in 1905 and received his doctorate with the work "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine".
After graduating from university, Zweig went to London and Paris (1905), then traveled to Italy and Spain (1906), visited India, Indochina, the USA, Cuba, Panama (1912). During the last years of the First World War he lived in Switzerland (1917-1918). During the war, Zweig served in the archives of the Ministry of Defense and very quickly became imbued with the anti-war sentiments of his friend Romain Rolland, whom he called in his essay “the conscience of Europe.” The short stories “Amok” (1922), “Confusion of Feelings” (1927), “Humanity’s Finest Hours” (1927) brought Zweig first European and then world fame. In addition to short stories, Zweig’s biographical works are also becoming popular, especially “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” (1934) and “Mary Stuart” (1935).
With the Nazis coming to power, Zweig, as a Jew by nationality, found it impossible to remain in Austria and in 1935 he emigrated to London. Then the writer wanders between Latin America and the United States, eventually settling in the small Brazilian city of Petropolis. Stefan Zweig was very sensitive to the very fact of the outbreak of World War II and the successes of the Nazis. The experiences were aggravated by the fact that Zweig found himself cut off from friends and practically deprived of communication. Deeply depressed and despairing over the expected collapse of Europe and Hitler's victory, Stefan Zweig committed suicide in 1942 by taking a lethal dose of sleeping pills. His second wife also passed away with him.
Erich Maria Remarque wrote about Zweig’s suicide in his novel “Shadows in Paradise”: “If on 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, their misfortunes, it probably wouldn't have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign land among strangers.”
Bibliography
Fiction
Die Liebe der Erika Ewald (1904)
(1913)
(1922)
(1922)
Angst (1925)
(1925)
The Invisible Collection (1926)
Der Fluchtling (1927)
(1927)
(1927)
(1939) novel
Chess novella (1942)
(1982) unfinished, published posthumously
Biographical writings
Emile Verhaeren (1910)
(1920)
Romain Rolland. Der Mann und das Werk (1921)
(1925)
Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927)
(1928)
(1929)
(Healing by Spirit) (1932)
(1932)
Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer who became famous mainly as the author of short stories and fictional biographies; literary critic. He was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 in the family of a Jewish manufacturer, the owner of a textile factory. About children's and adolescence Zweig did not expand on the typicality of this period of life for representatives of his environment.
Having received his education at the gymnasium, Stefan became a student at the University of Vienna in 1900, where he studied German studies and novels in depth at the Faculty of Philology. While still a student, his debut poetry collection “Silver Strings” was published. The aspiring writer sent his book to Rilke, under the influence of whose creative style it was written, and the consequence of this act was their friendship, interrupted only by the death of the second. During these same years, literary critical activity also began: Berlin and Vienna magazines published articles by the young Zweig. After graduating from university and receiving his doctorate in 1904, Zweig published a collection of short stories, “The Love of Erica Ewald,” as well as poetic translations.
1905-1906 open a period of active travel in Zweig’s life. Starting from Paris and London, he subsequently traveled to Spain, Italy, then his travels went beyond the continent, he visited North and South America, India, and Indochina. During the First World War, Zweig was an employee of the archives of the Ministry of Defense, had access to documents and was not without influence good friend R. Rolland turned into a pacifist, wrote articles, plays, and short stories of an anti-war nature. He called Rolland himself “the conscience of Europe.” During these same years, he created a number of essays, the main characters of which were M. Proust, T. Mann, M. Gorky and others. Throughout 1917-1918. Zweig lived in Switzerland, and in the post-war years Salzburg became his place of residence.
In the 20-30s. Zweig continues to write actively. During 1920-1928. biographies are coming out famous people, united under the title “Builders of the World” (Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Stendhal, etc.). At the same time, S. Zweig was engaged in short stories, and works of this particular genre turned him into popular writer not only in our country and on the continent, but throughout the world. His short stories were built according to his own model, which distinguished Zweig's creative style from other works of this genre. Biographical works also enjoyed considerable success. This was especially true of “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” written in 1934 and “Mary Stuart” published in 1935. The writer tried his hand at the novel genre only twice, because he understood that his calling was short stories, and attempts to write a large-scale canvas turned into failure. Only “Impatience of the Heart” and the unfinished “Frenzy of Transfiguration” came out of his pen, which was published four decades after the author’s death.
The last period of Zweig’s life was associated with a constant change of residence. Being a Jew, he could not remain living in Austria after the Nazis came to power. In 1935, the writer moved to London, but did not feel completely safe in the capital of Great Britain, so he left the continent and in 1940 found himself in Latin America. In 1941, he temporarily moved to the United States, but then returned to Brazil, where he settled in a not very big city Petropolis.
Literary activity continues, Zweig publishes literary criticism, essay, collection of speeches, memoirs, works of art, however, his state of mind is very far from calm. In his imagination, he painted a picture of the victory of Hitler’s troops and the death of Europe, and this led the writer to despair, he plunged into severe depression. Being in another part of the world, he did not have the opportunity to communicate with friends, and experienced an acute feeling of loneliness, although he lived in Petropolis with his wife. On February 23, 1942, Zweig and his wife took a huge dose of sleeping pills and voluntarily died.
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