Austrian writer Stefan Zweig: biography, creativity, interesting facts from life

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer who lived and worked between the two world wars. He traveled extensively in the early twentieth century. The work of Stefan Zweig often turns to the past, trying to bring back the golden age. His novels express the hope that war will never return to Europe. He was an ardent opponent of all military actions, he was very upset by the onset of World War II, expressing his protest and thoughts in literary works. Books by Stefan 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, novelist) and journalist. Born November 28, 1881. For 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 birthplace was Vienna. He was born into a we althy Jewish family. His father Moritz Zweig was the owner of a textile factory. Mother Ida wassuccessor of the family of Jewish bankers. Little is known about the youth of the writer Stefan Zweig. The writer himself spoke of her sparingly, referring to the fact that his life was similar to the life of all the intellectuals of that time. In 1900 he graduated from the gymnasium. Then he studied at the University of Vienna at the Department of Philosophy.

After graduating from university, Zweig went on a journey. Was in London and Paris, traveled to Spain and Italy, was in Indochina, India, Cuba, USA, Panama. He lived in Switzerland at the end of the First World War. After her, he settled near Salzburg (western Austria).

After Hitler came to power, he leaves Austria. He moves to London. In 1940, he lived for some time with his wife in New York, then settled in the suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Petropolis. On February 22, 1942, Zweig and his wife were found dead in their home. They lay on the floor holding hands. The couple were severely disappointed and depressed for a long time because of 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 in his novel “Shadows in Paradise” wrote: “If on that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could pour out their soul to someone at least by phone, tragedy might not have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign country among strangers.”

Zweig's home in Brazil has been turned into a museum known as Casa Stefan Zweig.

Creativity

Zweig published the first poetry collection already instudy time. They became "Silver Strings" - poems written under the influence of the modernist works of the Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke. Plucking up courage, Zweig sent his book to the poet, and in return received Rilke's collection. Thus began a friendship that ended in 1926 with the death of Rilke.

During World War I, Zweig talks a lot about other writers. Publishes an essay on 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. A separate essay is devoted to each of them.

Family

As already mentioned, the writer was born in a we althy Jewish family. As a young man, Stefan Zweig was very handsome. The young man enjoyed unprecedented success with women. The first long and vivid romance began with a mysterious letter from a stranger, signed with the mysterious initials FMFV. Frederica Maria von Winternitz, like Zweig, was a writer, and in addition, the wife of an important official. After the end of the First World War in 1920, they married, lived for 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 devoted to him to death, and, as it turned out later, in a literal sense.

Literature

Settled in Salzburg, Stefan Zweig took up literature. One of the first compositions was the short story "A Letter from a Stranger". The novel struck critics and readers with its sincerity and understanding.feminine essence. The work describes the love story of a stranger and a writer. It was made in the form of a letter from a girl, in which she talks about great love, the vicissitudes of fate, the intersection of the life paths of two heroes. The first time they met was when they lived next door. The girl was then 13 years old. Then came the move. The girl had to suffer alone without a loved and dear person. Romance returned when the girl was back in Vienna. She finds out about the pregnancy, but does not tell the child's father about it.

Their next meeting takes place only after 11 years. The writer does not recognize in the woman the only one with whom the affair took place so many years ago. The stranger tells this story only when her child dies. She decides to write a letter to the man she has been in love with all her life. Zweig impressed readers with his sensitivity to the female soul.

Peak career

Zweig's skill was revealed gradually. At the peak of his work, he writes such novels as "Confusion of Feelings", "Amok", "Humanity's Star Clock", "Mendel the Secondhand Bookist", "Chess Novella". 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 the Austrian writer?

Features of creativity

Readers believed that the unusual nature of the plots allows them to reflect, think about what is happening, think about important things, about how unfair fate can be at times, especiallytowards ordinary people. The author believed that the heart of a person cannot be saved, that only it can make people perform feats, noble deeds, and do justice. And that the human heart, smitten with passion, is ready for the most reckless and risky actions: “Passion is capable of much. It can awaken an impossible superhuman energy in a person. She can squeeze titanic strength out of even the calmest soul with her continuous pressure.”

He actively developed the theme of compassion in his literature: “There are two kinds of compassion. The first is sentimental and cowardly; in essence, it is nothing but the excitement of the heart, in a hurry to get rid of the heavy feeling at the sight of someone else's misfortune; this is not sympathy, but only an instinctive desire to protect one's calmness from the torment of one's neighbor. But there is another compassion - the real one, which needs action, not sentiment, it knows what it wants, and is determined, suffering and compassionate, to do everything in its power and even beyond it.

Zweig's works were very different from the works of other writers of that time. He developed his own storytelling model for a long time. The model of the writer is based on the events that happened to him during his wanderings. They are heterogeneous: the plot of the journey changes - it is sometimes tedious, sometimes full of adventures, sometimes dangerous. This is how the books should have been.

Zweig considered it important that the fateful moment should not wait days, months. It only takes a few minutes or hoursin order to become the most important thing in a person's life. Everything that happens to the heroes happens during short stops, respite from the road. These are the moments in which a person goes through a real test, tests his ability to self-sacrifice. The center of each story is the hero's monologue, uttered in a state of passion.

Zweig did not like to write novels - he did not understand such a genre, he could not fit the event into a long narrative in space: “Just as in politics one sharp word, one detail often affects much more reliably than a whole Demosthenes speech, so in the literary work of a miniature often live longer than thick novels.”

All his short stories are like summaries of large-scale works. However, there are books similar to the novel genre. For example, "Impatience of the Heart", "Fever 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 long-winded protracted short stories, so novels about modern life are not found in his work.

Historical prose

Sometimes Zweig abandoned fiction and completely immersed himself in history. He devoted whole days to creating biographies of contemporaries, historical heroes. Biographies have been written of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ferdinand Magellan, Mary Stuart and many others. 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 hisZweig showed in his essay “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” what feelings and emotions excite him personally. He says that he is close to the position of Rotterdamsky about a citizen of the world - a scientist who preferred ordinary life, avoided high positions and other privileges, who did not like secular life. The goal of a scientist's life was his own independence. In Zweig's book, Erasmus is shown as a man who condemns the ignoramuses and fanatics. Rotterdam opposed the incitement of various strife between people. While Europe was turning into a huge slaughter with ever-increasing inter-class and inter-ethnic strife, Zweig showed events from a completely different angle.

Stefan Zweig's concept was this. In his opinion, Erasmus could not prevent what was happening, so a sense of internal tragedy grew in him. Like Rotterdamsky, Zweig himself wanted to believe that the First World War was just a misunderstanding, an extraordinary situation that would never happen again. Zweig and his friends, Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland, failed to save the world from the second war. While Zweig was writing a book about Rotterdam, his house was being searched by the German authorities.

In 1935 Stefan Zweig's book "Mary Stuart" was published. He called it a novelized biography. The writer studied the letters of Mary Stuart to the Queen of England, between which lay not only huge distances, but also feelings of burning hatred. The book uses the correspondence of two queens, full of insults and barbs. In order to render 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 follow different paths. All events are evaluated differently depending on which side we judge them from: from the point of view of political advantages or from the point of view of humanity. At the time of writing the book, this conflict for Zweig was not speculative, but was quite tangible in nature, which directly concerned the writer himself.

Zweig especially appreciated the true facts that seem unreal, thereby extolling man and humanity: “There is nothing more beautiful than the truth that seems implausible! In the most significant feats of mankind, precisely because they always rise so high above the usual everyday affairs, there is something completely incomprehensible. But only in that inexplicable thing that it has done, humanity finds faith in itself again and again.”

Zweig and Russian literature

Zweig's special love was Russian literature, which he met in the gymnasium. During his studies at the 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 timed to coincide with the celebration of the centenary of the birth of the Russian classic Leo Tolstoy. During the visit, Zweig met Konstantin Fedin, Vladimir Lidin. Zweig did not idealize the Soviet Union. He expressed dissatisfaction with Romain Rolland, comparing the veterans of the revolution, who were shot, with rabiddogs, 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 an artist of the first class, especially highlighting the gift of a thinker among his talents. He noted that Zweig talentedly conveys even the most subtle shades of the entire gamut of feelings and experiences of an ordinary person. These words became the preface to Stefan Zweig's book 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", which became the last work he wrote, is interesting. It is dedicated to the experience of the writer, whose former world has disappeared, and in the new one he feels superfluous. The last years of his life, he and his wife literally wander around the world: they run from Salzburg to London, trying to find a safe place to live. Then he moved to the United States of America and to Latin America. In the end, he stops in the Brazilian Petropolis, not far from Rio de Janeiro. All the emotions that the author experienced were reflected in his book: “After sixty, new strength is required to start life anew. My strength is exhausted by years of wandering and wandering far from my homeland. In addition, I think it would be better now, with your head held high, to put an end to your existence, the highest value of which was personal freedom, and the main joy - intellectual work. Let others see the dawn after a long night! And II'm too impatient, so I'll leave before the rest."

Screenings of works by Stefan Zweig

Five years after the publication of the novel "24 Hours in the Life of a Woman", a film based on it was made. This was done by the German director Robert Land in 1931. It is worth noting that this was the first film adaptation of Zweig's work. In 1933 director Robert Siodmak filmed The Burning Secret. In 1934, the Russian director Fyodor Otsep filmed the short story "Amok". All three films were released during the life of the writer.

After the war, in 1946, the film "Beware of Pity" was released in the UK, which becomes an adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novel "Impatience of the Heart" (directed by Maurice Elway). In 1979, a remake of it was directed by the French Edouard Molinaro under the title A Dangerous Pity.

German director Max Ophuls in 1948 shoots a romantic drama based on the novel "A Letter from a Stranger", and in 1954 the legendary Italian director Roberto Rossellini shoots the film "Fear" (or "I no longer 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 - "The Chess Story".

Belgian Etienne Perrier made a film based on "Confusion". And Andrew Birkin's film "Burning Secret" won prizes at two film festivals at once.

Zweig does not lose its relevance and popularity even in the 21st century. Frenchman Jacques Deray presents his version of "Letters from a Stranger", Laurent Bunica - "24 Hours in the Life of a Woman". In 2013, two films were released immediately -"Love for Love" by Sergei Ashkenazy, based on the novel "Impatience of the Heart" and the melodrama "Promise" by Patrice Leconte, based on the novel "Journey into the Past".

Interestingly, the film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was shot based on the works of Zweig. Wes Anderson was inspired to create it by Stefan Zweig's novels Impatience of the Heart, Yesterday's World. Notes of a European", "Twenty-four hours from the life of a woman".