Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer who lived and worked between the two world wars. He traveled a lot in the early twentieth century. The work of Stefan Zweig often turns into the past, trying to return the golden age. His novels express the hope that the war will never return to Europe. He was an ardent opponent of all military operations, he was hard at the onset of the Second World War, expressing his protest and thoughts in literary works. The books of Stephen Zweig still do not leave readers indifferent. They will remain relevant for a long time.
Biography
Stefan Zweig is a legendary Austrian writer (playwright, poet, prose writer) and journalist. Born November 28, 1881. Over 60 years of his life he wrote a huge number of novels, plays, biographies in the genre of fiction. Let's try to understand the biography and find out interesting facts from the life of Stefan Zweig.
Zweig's homeland was Vienna. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His father Moritz Zweig was the owner of a textile factory. Ida's mother was a successor to the family of Jewish bankers. Little is known about the youth of the writer Stefan Zweig. The writer himself spoke sparingly about her, citing the fact that his life was similar to the life of all the intellectuals of that time. In 1900, he graduated from high school. Then he studied at the University of Vienna at the Department of Philosophy.
After graduating from university, Zweig went to travel. He was in London and Paris, traveled to Spain and Italy, was in Indochina, India, Cuba, USA, Panama. He lived in Switzerland when the First World War ended. After her, he settled near Salzburg (western Austria).
After Hitler came to power, he left Austria. He is moving to London. In 1940, he lives with his wife for some time in New York, then settles in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro Petropolis. On February 22, 1942, Zweig and his wife were found dead in their house. They lay on the floor holding hands. Spouses were severely disappointed and had long been depressed due to the lack of world peace and because they were forced to live away from home. The couple took a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his novel “Shadows in Paradise”: “If that night in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could have poured out someone’s soul at least by telephone, tragedy, maybe not would happen. But Zweig was in a foreign country among strangers. "
Zweig's house in Brazil has been turned into a museum known as Casa Stefan Zweig.
Creation
Zweig published his first poetry collection during his studies. They became “Silver Strings” - poems written under the impression of the modernist works of Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke. Gaining courage, Zweig sent his book to the poet, and in response received a collection of Rilke. So a friendship ensued, ending in 1926 with the death of Rilke.
During the First World War, Zweig talks a lot about other writers. He publishes an essay about the French writer Romain Rolland, whom he calls "the conscience of Europe." I thought a lot about such great writers as Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Maxim Gorky. Each of them has a separate essay.
A family
As already mentioned, the writer was born in a wealthy Jewish family. In his youth, Stefan Zweig was very beautiful. The young man enjoyed unprecedented success in women. The first long and vivid romance began with a mysterious letter from a stranger, signed by the mysterious initials of FMFV. Frederick Maria von Winternitz, like Zweig, was a writer, and in addition, the wife of an important official. After the end of World War I in 1920, they got married, lived almost 20 happy years, and divorced in 1938. A year later, Stefan Zweig married his secretary Charlotte Altmann. She was 27 years younger than him, was betrayed to him to death, and, as it turned out later, literally.
Literature
Having settled in Salzburg, Stefan Zweig was busy with literature. One of the first works was the novel "Letter to a Stranger." The short story impressed critics and readers with its sincerity and understanding of the feminine essence. The work describes the love story of a stranger and a writer. It is made in the form of a girl’s letter in which she talks about great love, vicissitudes of fate, the intersection of the life paths of two heroes. The first time they met was when they lived in the neighborhood. The girl then turned 13 years old. Then followed a move. The girl had to suffer alone without her beloved and dear person. Romance returned when the girl again ended up in Vienna. She learns about pregnancy, but does not report anything to the father of the child.
Their next meeting occurs only after 11 years. The writer does not recognize that woman as the only one whose romance happened so many years ago. The stranger tells this story only when her child dies. She decides to write a letter to a man with whom she has been in love all her life. Zweig impressed readers with sensitivity to the female soul.
Peak career
Zweig's mastery was revealed gradually. At the peak of his work, he writes such short stories as “Confusion of feelings”, “Amok”, “Starry clock of humanity”, “Mendel-second-hand bookkeeper”, “Chess novel”. All these works were written from 1922 to 1941, between the two world wars. It was they who made the writer famous. What did people find in the books of an Austrian writer?
Features of creativity
Readers believed that the unusual plot allows them to reflect, think about what is happening, think about important things, about how unjust fate happens at times, especially in relation to ordinary people. The author believed that it is impossible to protect the human heart, that only it can make people perform feats, noble deeds, and do justice. And that a human heart, struck by passion, is ready for the most reckless and risky acts: “Passion can do a lot. It can awaken in a person an impossible superhuman energy. She can, with her continuous pressure, squeeze even titanic powers out of her calmest soul. ”
He actively developed the theme of compassion in his literature: “There are two kinds of compassion. The first is sentimental and cowardly; it, in essence, is nothing but the excitement of a heart in a hurry to quickly get rid of a heavy sensation at the sight of someone else's misfortune; it is not sympathy, but only an instinctive desire to protect one’s peace from the torment of one’s neighbor. But there is another compassion - the present, which needs action, not sentiment, it knows what it wants, and is determined, suffering and compassion, to do everything in its power and even beyond them. ”
The works of Zweig were very different from the works of other writers of that time. He developed his own narrative model for a long time. The writer’s model is based on events that happened to him during wanderings. They are heterogeneous: the plot of the journey is changing - it is sometimes tiring, now full of adventure, then dangerous. Books should have been like that.
Zweig considered it important that a momentous moment should not wait for days, months. It takes only a few minutes or hours to become the most important thing in a person’s life. Everything that happens to the heroes occurs during short stops, respite from the road. These are the moments in which a person passes a real test, tests his ability to sacrifice himself. The center of each story is the hero’s monologue, pronounced in a state of passion.
Zweig didn’t like to write novels - he didn’t understand this genre, he couldn’t fit the event into a long narrative in space: “As in politics, one sharp word, one detail often works much more reliably than a whole Demosthenes speech, so miniatures often live longer than thick novels ".
All his short stories are similar to the compendium of large-scale works. Nevertheless, there are books similar to the genre of the novel. For example, “Impatience of the heart”, “The Burn of Transfiguration” (was not completed due to the death of the author, first published in 1982). But still, his works of this genre are more like verbose stretched short stories, so novels about modern life are not found in his work.
Historical prose
Sometimes Zweig threw fiction and completely immersed in history. He devoted all his days to creating biographies of contemporaries, historical heroes. Biographies of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Fernand Magellan, Mary Stuart and many others were written. The plot was based on official stories based on various papers and data, but in order to fill in the gaps, the author had to include his psychological thinking, fantasy.
In his work “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam,” Zweig showed what feelings and emotions excite him personally. He says that he is close to Rotterdam’s position on a citizen of the world - a scientist who preferred ordinary life, avoided high posts and other privileges, who did not like social life. The purpose of a scientist’s life was his own independence. In the book of Zweig, Erasmus is shown as a man condemning ignoramuses and fanatics. Rotterdam opposed the incitement of various discord between people. While Europe was turning into a huge massacre with ever-increasing interclass and ethnic hatred, Zweig showed events from a completely different perspective.
The concept of Stefan Zweig was as follows. In his opinion, Erasmus could not prevent what was happening, so a sense of inner tragedy grew in him. Like Rotterdam, Zweig himself wanted to believe that the First World War was just a misunderstanding, an out of the ordinary situation that would never happen again. Zweig and his friends failed to save the world from the second war: Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland. While Zweig was writing a book about Rotterdam, a search was underway in his house, initiated by German authorities.
In 1935, Stefan Zweig’s book, Mary Stuart, was published. He called her a romanized biography. The writer studied the letters of Mary Stuart to the Queen of England, between whom lay not only great distances, but also feelings of burning hatred. The book uses the correspondence of two queens, full of insults and taunts. In order to pass an impartial verdict to both queens, Zweig also turned to the testimonies of friends and enemies of the queens. He concludes that morality and politics go in different ways. All events are evaluated differently depending on which side we judge them from: in terms of political advantages or in terms of humanity. At the time of writing, this conflict for Zweig was not speculative, but was quite tangible, which directly concerned the writer himself.
Zweig especially appreciated genuine facts that seemed unreal, thereby extolling man and mankind: “There is nothing more beautiful than truth that seems implausible! In the most significant deeds of mankind, precisely because they are always so highly elevated over ordinary household affairs, something completely incomprehensible is enclosed. But only in the inexplicable that it has done, humanity gains faith in itself again and again. "
Zweig and Russian literature
A special love of Zweig was Russian literature, with whom he met at the gymnasium. During his studies at Vienna and Berlin universities, he carefully read Russian prose. He was in love with the works of Russian classics. He visited the USSR in 1928. The visit was dedicated to the celebration of the centenary of the birth of the Russian classic Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. During the visit, Zweig met with Konstantin Fedin, Vladimir Lidin. Zweig did not idealize the Soviet Union. He expressed dissatisfaction with Romain Rolland , comparing the revolution veterans who were shot with rabid dogs, noting that such treatment of people is unacceptable.
The Austrian novelist considered his main achievement to be the translation of a whole collection of his works into Russian. For example, Maxim Gorky called Zweig a first-class artist, especially highlighting the gift of a thinker among his talents. He noted that Zweig talentedly conveys even the most subtle shades of the whole gamut of feelings and experiences of an ordinary person. These words became the preface to the book of Stefan Zweig in the USSR.
Memoir prose
From all of the above, it can be understood how hard Stefan Zweig experienced the impending World War II. In this vein, his memoir book “Yesterday's World” is interesting, which was the last work he wrote. It is dedicated to the experiences of a writer whose former world has disappeared, but in the new he feels superfluous. The last years of his life, he and his wife literally wander around the world: he flees from Salzburg to London, trying to find a safe place to live. Then he moves to the United States and Latin America. In the end, he stops in the Brazilian Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro. All the emotions that the author experienced were reflected in his book: “After sixty, new forces are required to start life anew. My strength is tired of years of wandering and wandering far from home. In addition, I think it will be better now, with my head held high, to put an end to my existence, the highest value of which was personal freedom, and the main joy is intellectual work. Let others see the dawn after a long night! I’m too impatient, so I’ll leave before the others. "
Screen versions of the works of Stefan Zweig
Five years after the publication of the novel “24 Hours from the Woman's Life”, a film was made based on her motives. The German director Robert Land did this in 1931. It is worth noting that this was the first film adaptation of the works of Zweig. In 1933, director Robert Sjodmak filmed The Burning Secret. In 1934, the Russian director Fyodor Osep was filming the novel Amok. All three films were released during the life of the writer.
After the war, in 1946, the film “Beware of Pity” is released in Great Britain, which becomes an adaptation of Stefan Zweig ’s novel “Impatience of the Heart” (directed by Maurice Elvey). In 1979, his remake was shot by the Frenchman Eduard Molinaro called "Dangerous Pity."
In 1948, German director Max Ophuls shoots a romantic drama based on the novel “The Stranger’s Letter”, and in 1954, the legendary Italian director Roberto Rossellini makes the film “Fear” (or “I Don't Believe in Love”).
The German Gerd Oswald in 1960 made a film adaptation based on one of the most famous short stories by Stefan Zweig - “Chess Short Story”.
The Belgian Etienne Perrier made a film based on "Confusion of feelings." And the film by Andrew Birkin “The Burning Secret” received prizes at once from two film festivals.
Zweig does not lose its relevance and popularity even in the 21st century. Frenchman Jacques Deret presents his version of "Letter from a Stranger", Laurent Bunika - "24 hours from the life of a woman." In 2013, two films were immediately released - “Love for Love” by Sergey Ashkenazi, based on the novel “Impatience of the Heart” and the melodrama “Promise” by Patrice Lekont, based on the novel “Journey into the Past”.
Interestingly, based on the works of Zweig, the film “Hotel Grand Budapest” was shot. Wes Anderson’s creation was inspired by the novels of Stephen Zweig “Impatience of the heart”, “Yesterday’s world. Notes of a European ”,“ Twenty-Four Hours from a Woman's Life ”.