Stefan Zweig. Biography. Photos. Stefan Zweig. Explorer of the human soul Afterword to life

Stefan Zweig is one of the most popular Austrian writers in the world. His short stories about love capture 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. His life was big and bright love, 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 University of Vienna at Faculty of Philology. 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 have 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 what people consider indecent... Yesterday in a cafe we 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.

Against the background of even his stately, handsome husband (who cheated on her right and left), but in general, who was an ordinary official, Stefan was a special man for Friederike. She realized this very quickly. But Friederike also turned out to be an unusual woman for Zweig; 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 Valéry, 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 worldwide famous writer, 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: 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 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 to 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 somehow plain-looking, sickly 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 old times, 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, and 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 escape, 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 were sleeping. 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 ( 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).

Recent 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. 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 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 common 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"
"The street in 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)

Yesterday's world

Memoirs of a European

This is how we will meet the time,

how it will find us.

Shakespeare. Cymbeline

Preface

I have never attached so much importance to my person of great importance to be tempted to tell others the story of my life. Much had to happen - much more than usually falls to the lot of a single generation - events, trials and disasters, before I found the courage to begin a book in which my "I" - main character or better yet, focus. Nothing is more foreign to me than the role of a lecturer commenting on transparencies; time itself creates pictures, I just choose words for them, and it will be not so much about my fate as about the fate of an entire generation, marked by such a grave fate as hardly any other in the history of mankind. Each of us, even the most insignificant and unnoticed, is shocked to the very depths of our souls by the almost continuous volcanic tremors of the European soil; one of many, I have no other advantages except this one: as an Austrian, as a Jew, as a writer, as a humanist and pacifist, I have always found myself exactly where these tremors were felt most strongly. Three times they turned my house and my whole life upside down, tore me away from the past and threw me with hurricane force into the void, into the “nowhere” so well known to me. But I’m not complaining: a person deprived of his homeland gains a different freedom - someone who is not bound by anything can no longer take anything into account. Thus, I hope to comply with at least the main condition of any reliable depiction of the era - sincerity and impartiality, for I am cut off from all roots and even from the very earth that fed these roots - this is what I am now, which I would not wish on anyone else .

I was born in 1881 in a large and powerful empire, in the Habsburg monarchy, but you shouldn’t look for it on the map: it has been erased without a trace. Grew up in Vienna, that two-thousand-year-old supranational capital, and was forced to leave it as a criminal before it degenerated into German provincial town. Literary work mine, in the language in which I wrote it, has been reduced to ashes in the very country where millions of readers have made my books their friends. Thus, I no longer belong to anyone, I am a stranger everywhere, at best a guest; and my great homeland - Europe - has been lost to me since the second time it was torn apart by a fratricidal war. Against my will, I witnessed a terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of cruelty in history; Never before - I note this not with pride, but with shame - has any generation suffered such a moral decline from such a spiritual height as ours. In the short period of time that my beard grew and turned grey, during these half-century, more significant transformations and changes took place than usually happen in ten human lives, and each of us feels it - an incredible amount!

My Today is so different from any of my Yesterdays, my ups from my downs, that sometimes it seems to me as if I have lived not one, but several completely different lives. Therefore, every time I carelessly drop: “My life,” I involuntarily ask myself: “What kind of life? The one before the First World War, or the one before the Second, or the current one?” And then again I catch myself saying: “My home” - and I don’t know which of the previous ones I mean: in Bath, in Salzburg or parents' house in Vienna. Or I say: “With us” - and I remember with fear that for a long time now I have been as little a citizen of my country as I am a citizen of the British or Americans; there I am a cut-off piece, and here I am a foreign body; the world in which I grew up, and the world today, and the world that exists between them, are isolated in my consciousness; These are completely different worlds. Whenever I tell young people about the events before the first war, I notice from their perplexed questions that much of what still exists for me looks to them like distant history or something implausible. But deep down I have to admit: between our present and past, recent and distant, all bridges have been destroyed. Yes, I myself cannot help but be amazed at everything that we had to experience within one human life- even such a maximally unsettled one and facing the threat of destruction - especially when I compare it with the life of my ancestors. My father, my grandfather - what did they see? Each of them lived his life monotonously and monotonously. All, from beginning to end, without ups and downs, without shocks and threats, life with insignificant worries and imperceptible changes; in the same rhythm, measuredly and calmly, the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave. They lived in the same country, in the same city, and even almost constantly in the same house; the events taking place in the world, strictly speaking, happened only in newspapers; they did not knock on the door. True, somewhere in those days there was some kind of war going on, but it was, by today’s standards, more of a war, and it was played out far, far away, the guns were not heard, and after six months it faded away, was forgotten, like a fallen leaf history, and the old, same life began again. For us there was no return, nothing remained of the former, nothing returned; we have had this fate: to drink a full cup of what history usually dispenses to one country or another at one time or another. In any case, one generation experienced a revolution, another a putsch, a third a war, a fourth famine, a fifth inflation, and some blessed countries, blessed generations did not know any of this at all. We, who are sixty years old today and who, perhaps, are destined to live for some time yet, have not seen, suffered, or experienced! We have flipped through the catalog of every conceivable disaster from cover to cover - and still have not reached the last page. I alone witnessed two greatest wars humanity and met each of them on different fronts: one on the German, the other on the anti-German. Before the war I experienced the highest degree of individual freedom and then the lowest for several hundred years; I was praised and branded, I was free and bonded, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the Apocalypse rushed through my life - revolution and famine, inflation and terror, epidemics and emigration; Before my eyes, such mass ideologies as fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all this deadly plague - nationalism, which ruined the heyday of our country, grew and spread their influence. European culture. I found myself defenseless, a powerless witness to the incredible fall of humanity into the seemingly long-forgotten times of barbarism with its deliberate and programmed doctrine of anti-humanism. We were given the right - for the first time in several centuries - to see war again without a declaration of war, concentration camps, torture, mass looting and bombing of defenseless cities - all these atrocities that the last fifty generations have not known, and future ones, I would like to believe, will no longer tolerate. But, paradoxically, I saw that at the same time when our world was in morally was thrown back a thousand years, humanity has achieved incredible successes in technology and science, in one fell swoop surpassing everything achieved over millions of years: the conquest of the sky, the instant transmission of the human word to the other end of the earth and thereby overcoming space, the splitting of the atom, the victory over the most insidious diseases, oh than yesterday one could only dream of. Never before has humanity demonstrated its devilish and godlike essence so strongly.

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, became 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)

S. Zweig is known as a master of biographies and short stories. He created and developed his own models of the small genre, different from generally accepted norms. The works of Zweig Stefan are real literature with elegant language, impeccable plot and images of heroes, which impresses with its dynamics and demonstration of movement human soul.

Writer's family

S. Zweig was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 into a family of Jewish bankers. Stefan's grandfather, the father of Ida Brettauer's mother, was a Vatican banker, his father, Maurice Zweig, a millionaire, was engaged in the sale of textiles. The family was educated, the mother strictly raised her sons Alfred and Stefan. The spiritual basis of the family - theater performances, books, music. Despite numerous prohibitions, the boy valued personal freedom from childhood and achieved what he wanted.

The beginning of a creative journey

He began writing early, his first articles appeared in magazines in Vienna and Berlin in 1900. After high school, he entered the university at the Faculty of Philology, where he studied German and Romance Studies. As a freshman, he published the collection “Silver Strings.” Composers M. Reder and R. Strauss wrote music to his poems. At the same time, the young author’s first short stories were published.

In 1904 he graduated from the university, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In the same year, he published a collection of short stories “The Love of Erica Ewald” and translations of poems by E. Verhaeren, a Belgian poet. Over the next two years, Zweig travels a lot - India, Europe, Indochina, America. During the war he writes anti-war works.

Tries to experience life in all its diversity. He collects sheet music, manuscripts, and objects of great people, as if he wants to know their thoughts. At the same time, he does not shy away from the “outcasts,” the homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics, and strives to get to know their lives. He reads a lot, gets acquainted with famous people- O. Rodin, R. M. Rilke, E. Verhaeren. They occupy a special place in Zweig’s life, influencing his work.

Personal life

In 1908, Stefan saw F. Winternitz, they exchanged glances, but for a long time remember this meeting. Frederica was going through a difficult period; she was close to breaking up with her husband. A few years later they met by chance and, without even talking, recognized each other. After the second chance meeting, Frederica wrote him a letter full of dignity, where the young woman expresses her delight at Zweig’s translations of “Flowers of Life.”

Before they linked their lives, they dated for a long time, Frederica understood Stefan, treated him warmly and carefully. He is calm and happy with her. Separating, they exchanged letters. Zweig Stefan is sincere in his feelings, he tells his wife about his experiences and emerging depression. The couple are happy. After living a long and happy 18 years, they divorced in 1938. Stefan marries a year later to his secretary Charlotte, who is devoted to him to death both literally and figuratively.

State of mind

Doctors periodically send Zweig to rest from “overwork.” But he is unable to fully relax, he is famous, he is recognized. It is difficult to judge what the doctors meant by “overwork,” physical or mental fatigue, but the doctors’ intervention was necessary. Zweig traveled a lot, Frederica had two children from her first marriage, and she could not always accompany her husband.

The life of a writer is filled with meetings and travel. The 50th anniversary is approaching. Zweig Stefan feels discomfort, even fear. He writes to his friend V. Flyasher that he is not afraid of anything, not even death, but illness and old age frighten him. He recalls the mental crisis of L. Tolstoy: “The wife has become alien, the children are indifferent.” It is not known whether Zweig had real reasons for alarm, but in his mind they were.

Emigration

Things are heating up in Europe. Unknown people searched Zweig's house. The writer went to London, his wife remained in Salzburg. Perhaps because of the children, perhaps she was left to solve some problems. But judging by the letters, the relationship between them seemed warm. The writer became a British citizen, wrote tirelessly, but was sad: Hitler was gaining strength, everything was collapsing, genocide was looming. In May, the writer’s books were publicly burned at the stake in Vienna.

Against the backdrop of the political situation, a personal drama also developed. The writer was frightened by his age, he was full of worries about the future. In addition, emigration also had an impact. Despite seemingly favorable circumstances, it requires a lot of mental effort from a person. Stefan Zweig was enthusiastically greeted and treated kindly in England, America, and Brazil, and his books were sold out. But I didn’t want to write. In the midst of all these difficulties, a tragedy occurred in the divorce from Frederica.

The last letters reveal a deep mental crisis: “The news from Europe is terrible,” “I won’t see my home again,” “I’ll be a temporary guest everywhere,” “all that remains is to leave with dignity, quietly.” On February 22, 1942, he passed away after taking a large dose of sleeping pills. Charlotte passed away with him.

Ahead of time

Zweig often created fascinating biographies at the intersection of art and document. He did not formulate them into something entirely artistic, nor into documentary, nor into true romances. Zweig's determining factor in composing them was not only his own literary taste, but also general idea, arising from his view of history. The writer's heroes were people who were ahead of their time, who stood above the crowd and opposed it. From 1920 to 1928, the three-volume book “Builders of the World” was published.

The first volume, “Three Masters,” about Dickens, Balzac and Dostoevsky, was published in 1920. Such different writers in one book? The best explanation there will be a quote from Stefan Zweig: the book shows them “as types of world depictors who created in their novels a second reality along with the existing one.”
The author dedicated the second book, “The Fight against Madness,” to Kleist, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin (1925). Three geniuses, three destinies. Each of them was driven by some supernatural force into a cyclone of passion. Under the influence of their demon, they experienced duality, when chaos pulls forward, and the soul pulls back, towards humanity. They end their journey in madness or suicide.
In 1928 it saw the light last volume“Three Singers of Their Lives,” which tells the story of Tolstoy, Stendhal and Casanova. It is no coincidence that the author combined these disparate names in one book. Each of them, no matter what they wrote, filled the works with their own “I”. Therefore, the names of the greatest master of French prose, Stendhal, the seeker and creator of the moral ideal, Tolstoy, and the brilliant adventurer Casanova, stand side by side in this book.

Human destinies

Zweig's dramas "The Comedian", "City by the Sea", "The Legend of a Life" did not bring stage success. But his historical novels and the stories gained worldwide fame, they were translated into many languages and republished several times. Stefan Zweig's stories tactfully and yet frankly describe the most intimate human experiences. Zweig's short stories are fascinating in plot, full of tension and intensity.

The writer tirelessly convinces the reader that the human heart is defenseless, how incomprehensible human destinies are and what crimes or accomplishments passion pushes. These include unique psychological short stories stylized as medieval legends “Street in the Moonlight”, “Letter from a Stranger”, “Fear”, “First Experience”. In “Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman,” the author describes the passion for profit, which can kill every living thing in a person.

During these same years, collections of short stories “Stars of Humanity” (1927), “Confusion of Feelings” (1927), and “Amok” (1922) were published. In 1934, Zweig was forced to emigrate. He lived in the UK, USA, the writer's choice fell on Brazil. Here the writer publishes a collection of essays and speeches, Meeting People (1937), a poignant novel about unrequited love“Impatience of the Heart” (1939) and “Magellan” (1938), memoirs “Yesterday’s World” (1944).

History book

Separately, it is necessary to say about Zweig’s works, in which the heroes were historical figures. In this case, it was alien to the writer to speculate on any facts. He masterfully worked with documents; in any evidence, letter, or memory, he looked for, first of all, a psychological background.

The book “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” includes essays and novels dedicated to scientists, travelers, thinkers Z. Freud, E. Rotterdam, A. Vespucci, Magellan.
“Mary Stuart” by Stefan Zweig is the best biography of the tragically beautiful and eventful life of the Scottish queen. To this day it is full of unsolved mysteries.
In "Marie Antoinette" the author talked about tragic fate queen, executed by decision of the Revolutionary Tribunal. This is one of the most truthful and thoughtful novels. Marie Antoinette was pampered by the attention and admiration of the courtiers; her life was a series of pleasures. She had no idea that beyond opera house there is a world mired in hatred and poverty, which threw her under the knife of the guillotine.

As readers write in their reviews of Stefan Zweig, all of his works are incomparable. Each has its own shade, taste, life. Even read and re-read biographies are like an epiphany, like a revelation. You read as if about a completely different person. There is something fantastic in the writing style of this writer - you feel the power of the word over you and drown in its all-consuming power. You understand that his work is fiction, but you clearly see the hero, his feelings and thoughts.