German literature of the twentieth century. Germany, Austria: textbook Leonova Eva Aleksandrovna
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
The classic of German literature, Thomas Mann, once wrote about Stefan Zweig (1881–1942): “His literary fame penetrated to the most remote corners of the earth. An amazing case, given the low popularity of German authors in comparison with French and English ones. Perhaps since the time of Erasmus (whom he spoke so brilliantly) no writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig.” Zweig was especially popular, and not only among German-speaking readers, in the 20-30s of the 20th century. Maxim Gorky, for example, wrote in 1926: “Zweig - wonderful artist and a very talented thinker.”
Stefan Zweig was born on November 28, 1881 in Vienna into the family of a manufacturer, whose business was going quite well, and the family could afford to live, as they say, in step with the times. Both parents and children were frequent visitors to theaters and art exhibitions, participants musical evenings, meetings with European celebrities. After studying at the gymnasium, Stefan continued his education at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Vienna, then became a student at the university in Berlin. Zweig's life is full of events - acquaintances and friendships with the most interesting, wonderful people, travels across America, Asia, Africa, not to mention Europe, which he traveled, it seems, far and wide. In 1928, in connection with the celebrations dedicated to the centenary anniversary of Leo Tolstoy, he visited the Soviet Union. By the way, it was Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the Belgian writer Emile Verhaeren (thanks to whose assistance Zweig entered European literary circles) and the French writer Romain Rolland that he considered his literary mentors.
Knowing several languages, Zweig translates into German his favorite authors, primarily French-speaking ones (Paul Verlaine and Emile Verhaerne, their predecessor Charles Baudelaire, his “spiritual brother” Romain Rolland, etc.). He also tried his hand at literature: in 1898, one of the Berlin magazines published his first poem, which was followed by new ones in German and Austrian publications. Zweig summed up the initial period of his work in 1901 (although he would continue to write poetry) by publishing the poetry collection “Silver Strings.”
In the literature of Austria at this time, in addition to realism, various non-realistic trends (symbolism, impressionism, aestheticism) were developed, whose supporters were looking for new means of artistic embodiment of reality. These searches were also reflected in Zweig’s poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke praised the collection “Silver Strings”; some poems from the book were set to music. And yet Zweig will say the most powerful word in prose. The year 1904 became a kind of starting point for Zweig the prose writer, when his book of short stories “The Love of Erica Ewald” was published.
At the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The desire of the creative intelligentsia to unite has become a fairly typical phenomenon. Stefan Zweig also felt himself not so much an Austrian as a “European”, a “citizen of the world”. It was no coincidence that he subtitled the title of one of his best books of memoirs, “Yesterday’s World,” with the subtitle “Memoirs of a European.” And Austria-Hungary itself, the “grotesque” imperial-royal monarchy in which the future writer spent his childhood and youth, was, in the words of his compatriot, prose writer Robert Musil, a kind of “model of a multilingual and multifaceted Europe.” In one of his early notes, Zweig makes a very revealing remark: “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”.” About Stefan Zweig - of course, in in a certain sense- one can say in words from his own “Summer Novella”, addressed to the main character of this work: “... he - in a high sense - did not know his homeland, just as all the knights and beauty pirates do not know it.”
This did not at all exclude the artist’s appeal to scenes from the life of Austria, nostalgia for Vienna, no matter where Zweig was located. At the end of the 1920s, he would say, in particular: “... the old citoyen du monde (citizen of the universe) begins to freeze in the once so beloved infinity and even sentimentally yearn for his homeland.” His melancholy, despair and bitterness become even more palpable a decade later, when the fascist night loomed over Europe. “My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, was turned to ashes precisely in that country where millions of readers made my books their friends. Thus, I no longer belong to anyone, I am a stranger everywhere, in best case scenario 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... has any generation suffered such a moral decline from such a spiritual height as ours,” writes Stefan Zweig in the book “Yesterday’s World.”
A staunch opponent of any war, he supported any anti-war and anti-fascist speech, no matter where or from whom it came and no matter what its character - artistic or journalistic. Zweig spoke about his rejection of fascism both on the eve of World War II and later, when he found himself in exile in distant Brazil.
Zweig's fate was not cloudless in all respects. He experienced many personal dramas and disappointments, experienced not only the gratitude and admiration of readers, but also periods of oblivion. The historical catastrophes with which Zweig’s life was truly filled did not contribute to an optimistic view of the future. In the already quoted “Yesterday’s World” he will write: “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... what we haven’t seen, what we haven’t suffered, what we haven’t experienced! We flipped through the catalog of every conceivable catastrophe, from cover to cover, and still have not reached the last page... All the pale horses of the Apocalypse rushed through my life..."
Depression gradually increased; The writer was very sensitive to the news of the occupation of more and more territories by the Nazis. On February 22, 1942, Stefan Zweig writes his farewell “Declaration”: “The world of my native language has perished for me, and my spiritual homeland, Europe, has destroyed itself... When you are over sixty, you need extraordinary strength to start everything over again. My strength is exhausted... I greet all my friends. Perhaps they will see the dawn after a long night. I, the most impatient one, leave before them.” On February 23, in a hotel in Petropolis, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Zweig and his wife Lota committed suicide. The famous Austrian writer Franz Werfel, it seems, more accurately than others identified the reasons for the voluntary death of his great compatriot: “The established order of things seemed to him protected and protected by a system of thousands of guarantees... 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... Obviously, the darkening of this spiritual sky was a shock for Zweig that he could not bear..."
Zweig's creative heritage is extremely diverse in terms of genre: in addition to poems and poems, he left essays, travel notes, and reports. Deep understanding of cultural and public life Europe in the first four decades of the 20th century. give Zweig's posthumously published books Time and the World (1943), Yesterday's World: Memoirs of a European (1944), and European Heritage (1960). The writer wrote the novels “Impatience of the Heart” (1939) and “Christina Hoflener” (unfinished, published in 1982). A manifestation of his love for the country in which he, an emigrant, found a hospitable refuge, was his book “Brazil - the Country of the Future” (1941).
The cycle also became widely known historical miniatures Zweig’s “Humanity’s Finest Hours” (1927–1936), the main characters of which are not the biggest celebrities in the textbook sense of the word: the intercontinental telegraph cable builder Cyrus Field (“The First Word from Overseas”), the adventurer-pioneer Johann August Sutter, whose the intention to turn the Sacramento Valley into a flourishing land ultimately led to the famous “gold rush” (“Discovery of El Dorado”), the courageous and noble conqueror of the South Pole Captain Scott (“Struggle for the South Pole”), etc. At the same time, no matter what it was about we are talking about risky adventures or dramatic circumstances of life, about almost always tragic endings of human destinies - in the narrative, along with irony, there is invariably a kind of poetry and deep authorial empathy.
It would seem that the range of inventions and exploits that attracted the writer’s attention could have been different, more modern. For example, against the backdrop of implementation in various areas human life, the largest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. Stefan Zweig addresses the technical achievement mid-19th century - the laying of a telegraph cable between America and Europe, the results of which humanity continued to use, no longer, it seems, remembering who was responsible for the implementation of the project. Zweig in this story saw the materialized desire of people for unity, which was, as we know, a golden dream Austrian artist- “European”, “citizen of the world”, who imagined the future as a “grand world union”, growing in the field of “a single human consciousness”.
Attention to such, at first glance, quiet historical events and names can, however, be explained not only by the writer’s didactic considerations. It is characteristic that in miniatures we will find not only moments of triumph, but also tragic moments, hours that could have become, but did not become, stellar. In this regard, it makes sense to quote Stefan Zweig’s statement from the book “Yesterday’s World” about one of his early dramas, “Thersites”: “... in this drama a certain feature of my mental makeup was already reflected - never take the side of the so-called “heroes” and always to find the tragic only in the vanquished. Defeated by fate - that’s who attracts me..."
Taking these points into account, the meaning of individual miniatures from “Humanity’s Finest Hours,” including the miniature “The Genius of One Night,” becomes much clearer. In essence, in it too the writer explores his constant object, “the boundless world - the depth of man,” both in the “hot state” typical of his characters, and in another, balanced, everyday-calm state. The work has a subtitle containing indications of the historical event, which has become a kind of center of gravity in the story, and its exact time: “La Marseillaise. April 25, 1792."
Zweig's main character is a young man, captain of the fortification corps Rouget de Lisle. Gradually, remaining true to his novelistic technique, the author leads the hero to the culmination of his fate. Now, it seems, we physically feel the thunderous atmosphere that reigns for an infinitely long time in Paris, throughout the whole country, until, finally, Louis XVI declared war against the Austrian emperor and the Prussian king. We are witnessing the general enthusiasm that has gripped the city of Strasbourg; True, among the loud calls and fiery slogans, voices of dissatisfaction with the prospect of difficult military trials are also heard. And here is the farewell evening for the generals and officers leaving for the front. It seems that, quite by chance, the reader’s gaze falls on “not exactly a handsome, but a handsome officer,” to whom the mayor of Strasbourg, Baron Dietrich, does not very respectfully ask if he would try to write “something combative” for the Rhine Army. Rouget, a “modest, insignificant man,” does not even secretly imagine himself to be a great poet and composer, no one needs his works, but poems “on occasion” come easily to him - so why not try to please a high-ranking person? "Yes, he wants to try."
But where does the author’s irony go when, finally, that very finest hour comes and Rouge rises, soars above his ordinariness, above everyday life - to sacred heights, for one single night he stands on a par with the “immortals”. Exaltation and inspiration tear the “poor amateur” out of his everyday, gray existence and, like a rocket, lift him to the heavens, “to the stars.” A work of extraordinary power is born, a “bright miracle”, an immortal song, which from now on is destined to have a special, own destiny and which unpredictable adventures await. First heard in a provincial living room between an aria and a romance, it breaks out into the open, reaches Marseille in mysterious ways, becomes a marching march, a call to victory, the national anthem of the entire people.
Isn’t it for such a high point that a person lives? Let him return to his usual insignificance after this, let the creator, poet, genius die in him, but he has tasted the high happiness of creativity, the happiness of victory! It was precisely such uplifts of spirit that always attracted Zweig the writer. “In a person’s life,” he writes in the book “Mary Stuart,” “external and internal time only conditionally coincide; the only completeness of experience serves as the measure of the soul... intoxicated with feeling, blissfully free from fetters and fertilized by fate, she can in the shortest possible time recognize life in its entirety, so that later, in her detachment from passion, she again falls into the emptiness of endless years, sliding shadows, deaf Nothing. That is why in a lived life only tense, exciting moments count, that is why it is only in them and through them that it lends itself to a correct description. Only when all spiritual forces surge within a person is he truly alive for himself and for others; only when his soul is red-hot and blazing does he become a visible image.”
However, the “creative fire” (Romain Rolland) may fade away without being able to ignite or without having time to ignite human soul. S. Zweig talks about this in miniature “The Irreversible Moment”. The event that this time attracted the attention of the writer was the defeat of Napoleonic army in the famous Battle of Waterloo; specific date: June 18, 1815 History Napoleonic wars, undoubtedly, is replete with facts of genuine military leadership genius and the most talented strategic decisions, however, it is mediocrity that becomes Zweig’s hero. The author does not promise the reader any surprises and initially calls things by their proper names. He writes that sometimes the thread of fate ends up in the hands of insignificant people, to whom it does not bring joy, but fear of the responsibility entrusted to them. Once they miss the chance, this moment is lost forever.
Fate gave such a moment to Napoleonic general Grushi - “neither a hero nor a strategist,” but only a “courageous and judicious commander.” But at the decisive moment this is not enough; the finest hour requires initiative, insight, and confidence from the individual. Pear's indecision, slowness and limitations destroy what Napoleon created over the course of twenty years.
The most significant place in Zweig’s literary heritage is occupied by biographical works and psychological short stories.
The writer attached to the biographical genre special meaning, developing a variety of its forms - from large-scale canvases to miniatures. To significant biographical works Zweig researchers include a series of essays from four books “The Builders of the World” (about Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Freud, etc.), as well as the novels “Joseph Fouche” (1929), “Marie Antoinette” ( 1932), “The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam” (1934), “Mary Stuart” (1935), “Castellio against Calvin, or Conscience against Violence” (1936), “Magellan” (1938), “Balzac” (publ. 1946 ) etc. As in historical miniatures, in his biographical prose Zweig places people whose “high aspirations” are in doubt next to celebrities. However, the author himself was fully aware that, for example, the adventurer Casanova found himself among the “creative minds” as undeservedly as Pontius Pilate in the Gospel. The whole point is that Zweig was attracted, first of all, by the uniqueness and drama of human destiny, the presence of a “driving element” - passion, whatever or whoever it was directed at, talent, even if it was the talent of “mystical acting”, like Casanova, or a genius, albeit a “demonic” one, like Napoleon.
Zweig's biographical narratives are unusually entertaining for this genre and are distinguished by their intensely dramatic character. For all his immersion in the psychology and psyche of the characters, in their personal lives, Zweig always remained a sensitive and delicate author; he loved all his heroes - with their merits and talents, exploits and victories, but also with shortcomings, weaknesses and miscalculations, for he understood that only in the totality of contradictions are harmony and integrity born. At the same time, he adhered quite strictly to the facts. In one of latest interviews the writer argued that in the face of historical disasters of the 20th century. inventing events and figures seems to him frivolous, “frivolous”, and sharply contradicts the requirements of the time.
As is known, he proposed dividing all works in one way or another related to the depiction of the life and work of historical figures into three conditional groups: historical novel, novelized biography and “true biography.” At the same time, Zweig was strongly opposed to his own works about famous people being interpreted as historical novels or novelized biographies, because both of these forms allow for free handling of the document, and he sought to avoid such liberties. At the same time, Zweig is quite subjective: for example, in a specific historical figure, in her behavior he looked for consonance with his moods and spiritual aspirations. Some researchers reproached the writer for looking at a person, at an individual, as if through a magnifying glass, and at society, the people, through a diminutive glass. It is important, however, that Zweig not only allowed for the possibility of parallels between the past and the present, but also consciously provoked these parallels, so to speak, encouraging the reader to draw lessons from history in general and from the stories of individual historical figures in particular.
For example, the book “Castellio against Calvin, or Conscience against violence” is dedicated to little-studied pages of the history of European culture XVI century, the events of the Reformation era - an extremely controversial time, when a close study of antiquity and inspired discussions, on the one hand, were accompanied by curses and excommunications, the terror of the Inquisition, the persecution and burning of heretics, on the other. Of course, this terrifying “yesterday” was projected by Zweig onto the no less terrifying fascist “today” with its fanaticism and totalitarianism, physical and ideological violence.
In the introduction to the book, the author emphasized that in its internal formulation of the problem, in its deep essence, the historical dispute between Sebastian Castellio and Johann Calvin goes far beyond the boundaries of its era. In the final chapter of the work, the writer’s unshakable faith is heard that “all despotism very quickly either grows old or loses its inner fire... only the idea of spiritual freedom, the idea of all ideas and therefore invincible, eternally returns, for it is eternal, eternal as spirit. If for some period of time she is deprived of speech by outside forces, then she hides in the hidden depths of conscience, inaccessible to any oppression. It is in vain, therefore, that the rulers think that by sealing the mouth of the free spirit, they have already won. After all, with every person born, a new conscience is born, and there will always be someone ready to fulfill his spiritual duty, to begin again old fight for the inalienable rights of humanity and humanity, Castellio will again stand up against every Calvin and defend the sovereign independence of the way of thinking against all violence.”
Zweig's psychological novels are widely known in the cultural world. They were published, in addition to the above-mentioned book “The Love of Erica Ewald,” in the following sequence: the collection “First Experiences” (1911), the short story “Fear” (1920), the collection “Amok” (1922), the short story “The Invisible Collection” and the collection “ Confusion of feelings" (1927). The latest was the anti-fascist “Chess Novella” (1941). In 1936, the author gave most of his short stories the name “chain”, divided into cycles - “links”.
Once, through the mouth of the hero of the Chess Novella, Zweig said that his “passion for solving psychological riddles grew into mania.” This passion manifested itself with particular force in the short stories. Despite the fact that each of his short stories has its own plot, there is reason to talk about their undeniable unity - problematic and aesthetic. In all (with a few exceptions) short stories, the writer uses common artistic techniques. He deliberately calmly and slowly begins a story about unremarkable events and actions of seemingly unremarkable, “insignificant” people (such a beginning could be some kind of argument, acquaintance, or even a landscape sketch, etc.), only to then unexpectedly bring down the reader is burdened with unbearable mental suffering, to involve him in the world of strong feelings and dramatic clashes, hidden experiences, to show his heroes, women and men, young and mature, without the usual “masks”.
Passion, or a fatal moment that changes human existence, invariably attracts writer's attention. At the same time, the author does not accuse or justify, does not condemn or approve, does not explain or evaluate, because passion is a manifestation of spontaneous feelings and emotions, and approaching it with conditional criteria developed by society, according to Zweig, is as pointless as demanding report from a thunderstorm or summon a volcano to court. In the book “Mary Stuart” there are words that are very remarkable in this regard: “... when feelings reach such excess, it would be unwise to measure them by the yardstick of logic and reason, for the very essence of such unbridled affects is that they manifest themselves unreasonably. Passions, like illnesses... one can only describe them with ever-new amazement, shuddering before the eternal power of the elements, which, both in nature and in man, sometimes erupt in sudden outbreaks of thunderstorms. And inevitably the passions of this high voltage are not subject to the will of the person they strike..."
A feature of most Zweig short stories is first-person narration; this narrative, as a rule, constitutes the central part of the work, is accompanied by the deepest introspection of the narrator and contains the disclosure of one or another “burning secret”, passion for creativity, play, a specific person, etc. Most often, Zweig talks about love. Maxim Gorky, emphasizing that love is one of those forces that moves man and the world, guides cultural development society, considered Zweig the most the best artist, endowed with the rare gift of speaking about love heartfeltly, with “amazing mercy for man.” The Russian writer was especially impressed by Zweig’s images of women: “I don’t know an artist who could write about a woman with such respect and such tenderness for her.” Passion as depicted by Zweig causes a person incredible mental suffering and condemns him to moral trials. The epigraph to all of Zweig’s short stories could be a line from his own poem: “He who loves passion loves its torment.”
Zweig’s best short stories are “The Governess”, “Amok”, “Letter from a Stranger”, “Street in the Moonlight”, “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman”, “Leporella”, “Mendel the Bookseller”, “Chess Novella”, etc. Undoubtedly, the novella is one of the true masterpieces. "The Invisible Collection" published 1927
The short story begins with a banal conversation between random fellow travelers who, by force of circumstances, find themselves in the same compartment. The leisurely flow of the short introductory part is suddenly interrupted and replaced by the excited story of one of the passengers, a story that literally turned the soul of an elderly man, a famous Berlin antique dealer, upside down. One of his very first phrases: “In all my thirty-seven years of activity, I, an old art dealer, have never experienced anything like this,” makes you concentrate and look forward to the continuation of the story.
It turns out that Mr. R.’s antique shop was completely devastated by the “newly made rich,” who appeared in large numbers in Germany after the First World War, during the period of inflation, “since, like light gases, the value of money began to evaporate.” These “people possessed by the mania of acquisition” began to invest their capital in works of art and bought everything that came to hand, instantly inflamed with “a passion for Gothic Madonnas, ancient publications, paintings and engravings of old masters.” Expecting to purchase a new product, the owner of the shop headed to the province, where, according to the information he had, lived one of his oldest clients, who used the services of the father and grandfather of the current antique dealer, but never visited the shop in person and had not dealt with order or any request. In sixty years of collecting, this old man should have collected a considerable number of engravings worthy of becoming an adornment of any famous museum in the world.
And then an acquaintance with an old collector occurs; as it turned out, some time ago he completely lost his sight and now, weak and helpless, he finds the only solace in his collection. Every day he looks through it, or rather, he feels each print, receiving incredible pleasure from his wealth, feeling the same immense joy as before when he could see it. Immensely excited by the visit of a true art connoisseur, he hurries to show the guest his treasure, the collection of which he has been obsessed with all his life, which has become his true passion and for the sake of which he denied himself and his family everything.
The blind old man, however, does not know that his priceless collection - the meaning of life, the most precious thing for him - has long been dispersed throughout the world, and now he lovingly turns over, feels and counts not the most wonderful originals, not the works of Rembrandt and Durer, but worthless ones , pathetic copies or blank sheets of paper. From his daughter Anna-Marie, the guest learns about the fate of the treasure: finding himself in a hopeless situation, with no means of subsistence, he and his sister, who lost her husband in the war and was left with small children in her arms, they and their mother, so as not to die of hunger, started selling prints. Old Louise and her daughter do this in secret, not wanting to destroy the last illusion of their father and husband, to deprive him of faith and, finally, life, because the mere suspicion that there are no engravings would kill him. The girl begs the guest to support the “saving deception.”
It's time for a performance of sorts. All its involuntary participants experience feelings of unprecedented intensity: the owner of the false collection - bliss and rapture, pride and mental and spiritual enlightenment; the visitor – “mystical horror” of the passionate power of the blind collector’s inner vision, respect for him and at the same time shame and bitterness; daughter and mother - grief and warm gratitude for the moments of happiness given to the old man.
The novella is structured in such a way that it is the modest courage and exceptional sacrifice of women that evoke sympathy and respect in the reader even in to a greater extent, rather than the passion of an old collector, because, unlike him, they devoted themselves to serving a living and dear person to them, to saving the lives of him and their loved ones. “Perhaps we treated him badly, but there was nothing else left for us. It was necessary to live somehow... and aren’t human lives, aren’t four orphans more valuable than pictures..." It is no coincidence that the narrator compares the wife and daughter of a blind old man with the biblical women in the engraving of the German master, selfless followers of Christ, "who, having come to the tomb of the Savior and seeing that the stone had been rolled away and the coffin was empty, they froze at the entrance in joyful ecstasy before the miracle that had taken place, with an expression of pious horror on their faces”; “...it was an amazing picture, the like of which I had never seen in my entire life.”
Perfect in form, rich in deep moral and ethical content, the short story “The Invisible Collection” is read in one breath. In it, as in many other works of Zweig, his art of realistic storytelling was revealed. The most important components of the artistic palette of the work are subtle psychologism, precise detail, expressive portrait and linguistic characteristics, the use of contrast, extraordinary expressiveness, emotional intensity, a composition impeccable in its rigor and harmony, strong social overtones, thanks to which a private and exceptional situation is correlated with a tragic time , the fate of society.
“His cosmos is not the world, but man,” Stefan Zweig once said about Dostoevsky; Undoubtedly, these words are also true of the Austrian writer himself.
This text is an introductory fragment. Tokarev Dmitry Viktorovich From the book Western European Literature of the 20th Century: a textbook author Shervashidze Vera VakhtangovnaStéphane Mallarmé (1842 - 1898) The life of S. Mallarmé, unlike his predecessors - C. Baudelaire, A. Rimbaud - developed quite well. Realizing that poetry will not provide financial independence and stability of existence, Mallarmé is engaged in teaching
From the book Russia and the West [Collection of articles in honor of the 70th anniversary of K. M. Azadovsky] author Bogomolov Nikolay AlekseevichStefan Zweig through the eyes of Grigol Robakidze NOTE ON TOPICS In 2004, Kostya Azadovsky and I prepared for publication letters from the Georgian writer Grigol Robakidze to Stefan Zweig. Kostya discovered the letters themselves, written in German, in Zweig’s archive, translated and
From the book The End of Cultural Institutions of the Twenties in Leningrad author Malikova Maria EmmanuilovnaZweig When mentioning the Vremya publishing house, first of all they name two of its fundamental projects, unique in the history of Soviet translated book publishing of the twenties and thirties - multi-volume authorized collected works of Stefan Zweig (in 12 volumes,
School essay on literature for grade 11 - admission to the Unified State Exam
In the life of mankind there are, as Stefan Zweig put it, high points. These are probably decisive, turning points in time, when the fate of humanity, the entire society, and the course of development of the future are decided. The 20th century clearly demonstrated to the world the dead end of the development of civilization through militaristic means. Two World Wars, which claimed millions of human lives, local wars and armed conflicts around the world should have once and for all turned humanity away from war - legal mass murder. But the finest hour of the triumph of reason, goodness and mercy did not come in the 21st century. This means that we must not forget about the bitter lessons of war.
Literature about the Great Patriotic War is especially valuable for readers because most of the authors were witnesses or direct participants in those tragic events y, about which they wrote. Moral issues The things that concern a person in war remain eternal: goodness, justice, mercy, loyalty, courage, perseverance
B. Vasiliev’s story “The Dawns Here Are Quiet” is dedicated to one of the local operations, almost imperceptible on the scale of the entire war. The crew of anti-aircraft gunner girls, everyday life on the front line, May 1945... But the situation is gradually heating up, and the heroines of the story - yesterday's girls, each with their own difficult fate - make their moral choice. At the end of the story, Sergeant Major Vaskov, almost unarmed, takes four Germans prisoner and shouts in despair: “What, did you take them? ...there were five girls in total, just five! And - you didn’t pass...” On the verge of life and death, left alone with the enemy, the girls die, but remain honest with themselves, with their conscience. The tragedy of the situation is enhanced by the fact that in the center of the story are fragile women, whose purpose on Earth is to give new life, to continue the human race. Symbolic opposition: Life (woman) and Death (war) are in irreconcilable contradiction and only emphasize the severity of the problem.
The heroes of Vasil Bykov's story "Sotnikov" also face the problem of a moral choice: death or betrayal. The strong, self-confident Rybak and the physically weak, intelligent, reflective Sotnikov... It is he, sick and coughing, who will become the involuntary reason for their arrest and captivity. It is he who, on the way to the gallows, takes all the blame on himself, trying to save innocent people from death. But Rybak wants to survive at any cost, stalls for time, confuses the investigator, but in the end agrees to become a policeman and participates in the execution.
Bykov is trying to understand the behavior of his heroes, looking for the origins of their actions, from which the path of one began - to treason, and the other - to eternity. The writer shows insignificant, at first glance, actions and words, which gradually develop into complete images of people who are absolutely antagonistic in spirit and have made their moral choice. After the execution, walking in the same ranks with the policemen, Rybak mentally tries to justify himself to himself, blaming Sotnikov for everything. The traitor is not allowed to repeat even the repentant act of the biblical Judas - to hang himself. Weakness, animal fear of death, eternal hatred of those around him - such is his fate from now on.
Getting acquainted with works about the war, the peacetime reader, our contemporary, begins to realize the tragedy of our people, who suffered all the horrors of wartime, the hardships of life at the front and the pain of loss. We understand that we must not forget the lessons of history. Everything must be done to avoid a repetition of the tragedy of seventy years ago
Stefan Zweig- born November 28, 1881 in Vienna. The Austrian writer has many novels and plays to his credit. He was friends with such famous people as Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann.
Life never gives something for free, and everything that is presented by fate secretly has its own price.
If we all knew everything that is said about all of us, no one would talk to anyone.
Anyone who was once cruelly wounded by fate remains vulnerable forever.
A fool is more often than not clever man turns out to be evil.
You know yourself ad nauseam.
A woman is always forgiven for her talkativeness - but she is never forgiven for being right.
Only a fool is fascinated by so-called “success” with women, only a fool boasts about it. A real man is more likely to be confused when he feels that some woman is crazy about him, and he is unable to respond to her feeling.
Can you explain why people who cannot swim rush off a bridge to save a drowning man?
Ignorance is the great advantage of childhood.
Politics has always been a science of paradoxes. Simple, reasonable and natural solutions are alien to her: creating difficulties is her passion, sowing hostility is her calling.
Politics and reason rarely follow the same path.
It takes a lot of effort to restore faith to a person who was once deceived.
When friendship suddenly arises between a dog and a cat, it is nothing other than an alliance against the cook.
It's not a bad thing to first drive a person crazy and then demand reason from him!
The pathos of a pose is not a sign of greatness; he who needs poses is deceptive. Be careful around picturesque people.
If a person wants something so passionately, he will achieve his goal, God will help him.
Demanding logic from a young woman passionately in love is like looking for the sun in the dead of midnight. This is what distinguishes true passion: the scalpel of analysis and reason cannot be applied to it.
There is another and probably more cruel torture: to be loved against your will and not be able to defend yourself from the passion that harasses you; to see the person next to you burning in the fire of desire, and to know that you can’t help him, that you don’t have the strength to pull him out of this flame.
There is only one thing that disgusts me, and there is only one thing I cannot stand - excuses, empty words, lies - they make me sick!
The human eye had never seen anything like it: for the first time, an electric light was lit - not a spark, the spark was known - but precisely the light “with which dark chambers can be illuminated,” as Petrov wrote. Galvanic fire, “whose blinding brilliance on large voltaic batteries and coals is similar to the sun’s radiance,” is where man reached. “Let there be light!” - and there was light.
We do not know the exact date when this happened - somewhere in the beginning of 1802. Petrov carried out his experiments at night. The windows of his laboratory at the Medical-Surgical Academy overlooked the Neva. It is also known that he had no assistants; he was alone when he first saw this light. For a month, every night a strange, trembling light, still incomprehensible to the world, flashed in the windows of the laboratory, illuminating the bank of the frozen Neva with rare oil lanterns.
For thousands of years, man has struggled with darkness. The history of light, even if only in drawings, delights with its inexhaustible invention. Legionnaires' torches smoked, splinters crackled, Greek oil lamps smoked; they lit candles, wax, tallow, stearine, and gas lamps and kerosene lamps. And everywhere, in essence, the same fire burned, preserved from the primitive fire. Civilizations, taking turns, passed it on like a relay race that seemed to have no end.
In the life of humanity, as Stefan Zweig puts it, there are high points. Decisive peaks of time, when events caused by the genius of one person determine the fate of civilization, the course of development of the future. Such a high point was the moment when the first electric light fell on the Neva embankment. In fact, it did not change anything, but it became the starting point.
Science has many such inspired high points. Sometimes they are saved, these exact opening dates. The hours of revelation that gave rise to the periodic table, Pasteur's conjecture, and Faraday's discovery are known. The history of science is full of wonderful legends, starting with Archimedes, with his victorious cry of “Eureka!” With which he rushed through the streets of Syracuse. Sometimes embellished, they crown long hidden efforts, an invisible chain of disappointments, failures and thousands of rejected options. Inspiration is concentrated and discharged in a blinding, often spectacular flash that ends up in a textbook. But long before this, unknown backstories shape the scientist’s personality.
Archimedes became Archimedes before he cried “eureka!” Only searches and mistakes are individual. The discovery itself is impersonal. The laws of nature exist independently of their revealers, just as America existed independently of Columbus. Archimedes' law does not bear the imprint of his personality. America would not have changed if someone else had discovered it. Soon she discovered Columbus.
But the course of the search, the journey - everyone has their own. Doubts, failures, delusions, twists in the scientist’s thoughts - everything here depends on the individual, on the properties of talent, character, and performance.
Thus, many of Faraday’s difficulties, mistakes, and repeated experiments are explained by his poor memory, especially in the second half of his life.
The discovery itself comes, as a rule, with inexorable inevitability. Radio was created by Popov, but if Popov had not existed, radio would have been created by Marconi or someone else. Any discovery is inevitable. Everything that humanity has today had to appear. Personalities only changed the timing of events. And for the most part not very significant. Regardless of Edison's genius, the light bulb would be the same today. And not “almost the same,” but exactly the same. The story of Petrov's arc convinced me of the sad severity of this rule. The expression “mankind is indebted to the scientific genius of so-and-so” means something completely different, and Einstein captured this very correctly: “The moral qualities of a remarkable person have higher value for his generation and for the historical process than purely intellectual achievements. These latter themselves depend on the greatness of the spirit, a greatness that usually remains unknown.”
On February 23, 1942, newspapers around the world carried a sensational front-page headline: “Famous Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Charlotte committed suicide in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.” Under the headline was a photograph that looked more like a still from a Hollywood melodrama: dead spouses in bed. Zweig's face is peaceful and calm. Lotte touchingly laid her head on her husband's shoulder and gently squeezed his hand in hers.
At a time when in Europe and Far East human carnage was raging, claiming hundreds and thousands of lives every day, this message could not remain a sensation for long. Among his contemporaries, the writer’s act rather caused bewilderment, and among some (for example, Thomas Mann) it was simply indignation: “selfish contempt for his contemporaries.” Even more than half a century later, Zweig’s suicide still looks mysterious. He was considered one of the shoots of that suicidal harvest that the fascist regime collected from the fields of German-language literature. They compared it with similar and almost simultaneous actions of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, Ernst Weiss, and Walter Hasenklever. But there is no similarity here (except, of course, for the fact that all of the above were German-speaking writers - emigrants, and the majority were Jews). Weiss cut his veins when Hitler's troops entered Paris. While in the internment camp, Hasenclever poisoned himself, fearing that he would be handed over to the German authorities. Benjamin took poison, fearing to fall into the hands of the Gestapo: the Spanish border where he found himself was closed. Abandoned by his wife and left penniless, Toller hanged himself in a New York hotel.
Zweig did not have any obvious, ordinary reasons for taking his own life. No creative crisis. No financial difficulties. No fatal disease. No problems in my personal life. Before the war, Zweig was the most successful German writer. His works were published all over the world, translated into either 30 or 40 languages. By the standards of the literary community of that time, he was considered a multimillionaire. Of course, from the mid-30s the German book market was closed to him, but there were still American publishers. The day before his death, Zweig sent one of them his last two works, neatly reprinted by Lotte: “The Chess Novella” and the book of memoirs “Yesterday’s World.” Unfinished manuscripts were later discovered in the writer’s desk: a biography of Balzac, an essay about Montaigne, an untitled novel.
Three years earlier, Zweig married his secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was 27 years younger than him and devoted to him to death, as it turned out - in the literal, not figurative sense of the word. Finally, in 1940, he accepted British citizenship - a measure that freed him from the emigrant ordeals with documents and visas, vividly described in Remarque’s novels. Millions of people squeezed into the millstones of a giant European meat grinder could only envy the writer, who was comfortably settled in the paradise town of Petropolis and, together with his young wife, made forays into the famous carnival in Rio. A lethal dose of Veronal is not usually taken in such circumstances.
Of course, many versions have been expressed about the reasons for suicide. They talked about the writer’s loneliness in a foreign Brazil, longing for his native Austria, for a cozy house in Salzburg plundered by the Nazis, for the plunder of a famous collection of autographs, about fatigue and depression. Letters to his ex-wife were quoted (“I continue my work; but only at 1/4 of my strength. It’s just an old habit without any creativity...”, “I’m tired of everything...”, “ Better times have sunk forever...") They recalled the writer’s almost manic fear of the fatal figure of 60 years (“I’m afraid of illness, old age and addiction”). It is believed that the last straw that broke the cup of patience was newspaper reports about the Japanese capture of Singapore and the offensive of Wehrmacht troops in Libya. There were rumors that a German invasion of England was being prepared. Perhaps Zweig feared that the war from which he fled, crossing oceans and continents (England - USA - Brazil - his flight route) would spread to the Western Hemisphere. The most famous explanation was given by Remarque: “People who had no roots were extremely unstable - chance played in their lives decisive role. If that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could have poured out their souls to someone, at least over the phone, the misfortune might not have happened. But Zweig found himself in a foreign land among strangers” (“Shadows in Paradise”).
The heroes of many of Zweig's works ended the same way as their author. Perhaps, before his death, the writer remembered his own essay about Kleist, who committed double suicide with Henriette Vogel. But Zweig himself was never a suicidal person.
There is a strange logic in the fact that this gesture of despair ended the life of a man who seemed to his contemporaries to be the darling of fate, the favorite of the gods, the lucky one, the lucky one, born “with a silver spoon in his mouth.” “Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Zweig said at the end of his life. The word “maybe” is not very appropriate here. He was lucky always and everywhere. He was lucky with his parents: his father, Moritz Zweig, was a Viennese textile manufacturer, his mother, Ida Brettauer, belonged to the richest family of Jewish bankers, whose members settled all over the world. Wealthy, educated, assimilated Jews. He was lucky to be born as a second son: the eldest, Alfred, inherited his father's company, and the youngest was given the opportunity to study at the university to receive a university degree and support the family reputation with the title of Doctor of Science.
Lucky with time and place: Vienna late XIX century, Austrian " silver Age": Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Rilke in literature; Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern and Alban Berg in music; Klimt and the Secession in painting; performances of the Burgtheater and the Royal Opera, Freud's psychoanalytic school... The air is saturated with high culture. “The Age of Reliability,” as the nostalgic Zweig dubbed it in his dying memoirs.
Lucky with school. True, Zweig hated the “educational barracks” itself - the state gymnasium, but he found himself in a class “infected” with an interest in art: someone wrote poetry, someone painted, someone was going to become an actor, someone studied music and never missed a single concert, and some even published articles in magazines. Later, Zweig was lucky with the university: attending lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy was free, so he was not exhausted by classes and exams. It was possible to travel, live for a long time in Berlin and Paris, and meet celebrities.
He was lucky during the First World War: although Zweig was drafted into the army, he was sent only to easy work in the military archive. At the same time, the writer - a cosmopolitan and a convinced pacifist - could publish anti-war articles and dramas, and participate, together with Romain Rolland, in the creation of an international organization of cultural figures who opposed the war. In 1917, the Zurich theater began staging his play Jeremiah. This gave Zweig the opportunity to get a vacation and spend the end of the war in prosperous Switzerland.
Lucky with your appearance. In his youth, Zweig was handsome and a great success with the ladies. A long and passionate romance began with a “letter from a stranger” signed with the mysterious initials FMFV. Friederike Maria von Winternitz was also a writer, the wife of a major official. After the end of the First World War they got married. Twenty years of cloudless family happiness.
But most of all, of course, Zweig was lucky in literature. He began writing early, at the age of 16 he published his first aesthetically decadent poems, and at 19 he published a collection of poems, “Silver Strings,” at his own expense. Success came instantly: Rilke himself liked the poems, and the formidable editor of the most respectable Austrian newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl (the future founder of Zionism), took his articles for publication. But Zweig’s real fame came from the works written after the war: short stories, “novelized biographies”, a collection of historical miniatures “Humanity’s Finest Hours”, biographical sketches, collected in the series “World Builders”.
He considered himself a citizen of the world. Traveled to all continents, visited Africa, India and both Americas, spoke several languages. Franz Werfel said that Zweig was better prepared than anyone else for life in exile. Among Zweig's acquaintances and friends were almost all European celebrities: writers, artists, politicians. However, he was demonstratively not interested in politics, believing that “in real life, in real life, in the field of action of political forces, it is not outstanding minds, not bearers of pure ideas, that are decisive, but a much baser, but also more dexterous breed - behind-the-scenes figures, people of dubious morality and small intelligence,” like Joseph Fouché, whose biography he wrote. The apolitical Zweig never even went to the polls.
While still a high school student, at the age of 15, Zweig began collecting autographs of writers and composers. Later this hobby became his passion, he owned one of the best collections of manuscripts in the world, including pages written by the hand of Leonardo, Napoleon, Balzac, Mozart, Bach, Nietzsche, personal belongings of Goethe and Beethoven. There were at least 4 thousand catalogs alone.
All this success and brilliance had, however, a downside. In the writing community they caused jealousy and envy. As John Fowles put it, “the silver spoon eventually began to turn into a crucifix.” Brecht, Musil, Canetti, Hesse, Kraus left openly hostile statements about Zweig. Hofmannsthal, one of the organizers of the Salzburg Festival, demanded that Zweig not appear at the festival. The writer bought a house in small, provincial Salzburg during the First World War, long before any festivals, but he respected this agreement and every summer, during the festival, he left the city. Others were not so forthcoming. Thomas Mann, considered the No. 1 German writer, was not too happy about the fact that someone had overtaken him in popularity and sales ratings. And although he wrote about Zweig: “His literary fame penetrated to the most remote corners of the earth. Perhaps, since the time of Erasmus, no writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig,” among those close to him, Mann called him one of the worst modern German writers. True, Mann’s bar was not low: both Feuchtwanger and Remarque ended up in the same company along with Zweig.
"The non-Austrian Austrian, the non-Jewish Jew." Zweig really did not feel like either an Austrian or a Jew. He recognized himself as a European and spent his whole life advocating for the creation of a united Europe - an insanely utopian idea in the interwar period, realized several decades after his death.
Zweig said of himself and his parents that they “were Jews only by accident of birth.” Like many successful, assimilated Western Jews, he had a slight disdain for the Ostjuden, the Yiddish-speaking, impoverished people of the Pale of Settlement who followed a traditional lifestyle. When Herzl tried to recruit Zweig to work in the Zionist movement, he flatly refused. In 1935, once in New York, he did not speak out about the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, fearing that this would only worsen their situation. Zweig was condemned for this refusal to use his influence in the fight against growing anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt called him “a bourgeois writer who never cared about the fate of his own people.” In reality, everything was more complicated. Asking himself what nationality he would choose in a united Europe of the future, Zweig admitted that he would prefer to be a Jew, a person with a spiritual rather than a physical homeland.
It is difficult for Zweig's reader to believe the fact that he lived until 1942, survived two world wars, several revolutions and the onset of fascism, and that he traveled all over the world. It seems that his life stopped somewhere in the 20s, if not earlier, and that he had never been outside of Central Europe. The action of almost all of his short stories and novels takes place in the pre-war period, as a rule, in Vienna, less often in some European resorts. It seems that in his work Zweig was trying to escape into the past - into the blessed “golden age of reliability.”
Another way to escape into the past was to study history. Biographies, historical essays and miniatures, reviews and memoirs occupy much more space in Zweig’s creative heritage than the original works - a couple of dozen short stories and two novels. Zweig's historical interests were not unusual, all German literature his time was overcome by a “thirst for history” (critic V. Schmidt-Dengler): Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Emil Ludwig... The era of wars and revolutions required historical comprehension. “When such great events take place in history, you don’t want to invent them in art,” said Zweig.
Zweig’s peculiarity is that for him history was reduced to individual, decisive, crisis moments - “ high point", "truly historical, great and unforgettable moments." During such hours, the unknown captain of the engineering forces Rouget de Lisle creates the Marseillaise, the adventurer Vasco Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean, and because of the indecisiveness of Marshal Grouchy, the destinies of Europe change. Zweig celebrated such historical moments in his life. Thus, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for him was symbolized by the meeting on the Swiss border with the train of the last Emperor Charles, who was sending him into exile. He also collected autographs of celebrities for a reason, but looked for those manuscripts that would express a moment of inspiration, the creative insight of a genius, which would allow “to comprehend in the relic of a manuscript what made the immortals immortal for the world.”
Zweig’s short stories are also the stories of one “fantastic night,” “24 hours in the life”: a concentrated moment when the hidden possibilities of the individual, the abilities and passions dormant within him, burst out. Biographies of Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette are stories about how “an ordinary, everyday fate turns into a tragedy on an ancient scale,” average person proves worthy of greatness. Zweig believed that every person has a certain innate, “demonic” beginning that drives him beyond the boundaries of his own personality, “toward danger, to the unknown, to risk.” It was this breakthrough of the dangerous - or sublime - part of our soul that he loved to depict. He called one of his biographical trilogies “Fighting the Demon”: Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, “Dionysian” natures, completely subordinated to the “power of the demon” and contrasted with the harmonious Olympian Goethe.
Zweig's paradox is the lack of clarity as to which “literary class” he should be classified as. He considered himself a “serious writer,” but it is obvious that his works are rather high-quality mass literature: melodramatic plots, entertaining biographies celebrities. According to Stephen Spender, Zweig's main readership was teenagers from middle-class European families - they avidly read stories about how, behind the respectable façade of bourgeois society, there were hidden "burning secrets" and passions: sexual attraction, fears, mania and madness. Many of Zweig’s short stories seem to be illustrations of Freud’s research, which is not surprising: they moved in the same circles, described the same respectable and respectable Viennese, who hid a bunch of subconscious complexes under the guise of decency.
For all his brightness and external brilliance, there is something elusive and unclear in Zweig. He was rather a closed person. His works cannot be called autobiographical. “Your things are only a third of your personality,” his first wife wrote to him. In Zweig's memoirs, the reader is struck by their strange impersonalism: it is more a biography of an era than of an individual person. Not much can be learned from them about the writer’s personal life. In Zweig's short stories, the figure of the narrator often appears, but he always keeps in the shadows, in the background, performing purely official functions. The writer, oddly enough, gave his own traits to those far from the most pleasant of his characters: the annoying collector of celebrities in “Impatience of the Heart” or the writer in “Letter from a Stranger.” All this rather resembles self-caricature - perhaps unconscious and not even noticed by Zweig himself.
Zweig is generally a writer with a double bottom: if you wish, in his most classic works you can find associations with Kafka - with whom he, it would seem, had nothing in common! Meanwhile, “The Decline of One Heart” is a story about the instantaneous and terrible disintegration of a family - the same as “Metamorphosis,” only without any phantasmagoria, and the discussions about the trial in “Fear” seem borrowed from “The Trial.” Critics have long noticed the similarity of the plot lines of “The Chess Novella” with Nabokov’s “Luzhin.” Well, the famous romantic “Letter from a Stranger” in the era of postmodernism is tempting to be read in the spirit of Priestley’s “An Inspector’s Visit”: a hoax that created a great love story out of several random women.
Zweig's literary fate is a mirror version of the romantic legend about an unrecognized artist, whose talent remained unappreciated by his contemporaries and was recognized only after death. In the case of Zweig, everything turned out exactly the opposite: according to Fowles, “Stephan Zweig experienced, after his death in 1942, the most complete oblivion of any writer of our century.” Fowles, of course, exaggerates: Zweig, even during his lifetime, was not “the most read and translated serious writer in the world,” and his oblivion is far from complete. In at least two countries, Zweig's popularity never waned. These countries are France and, oddly enough, Russia. Why Zweig was so loved in the USSR (his collected works were published in 12 volumes in 1928-1932) is a mystery. The liberal and humanist Zweig had nothing in common with the communists and fellow travelers beloved by the Soviet regime.
Zweig was one of the first to feel the onset of fascism. By a strange coincidence, from the terrace of the writer’s Salzburg house, located near the German border, there was a view of Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer’s favorite residence. In 1934, Zweig left Austria - four years before the Anschluss. The formal pretext was the desire to work in the British archives on the history of Mary Stuart, but deep down he knew that he would not return back.
During these years, he writes about individual idealists, Erasmus and Castellio, who opposed fanaticism and totalitarianism. In Zweig’s contemporary reality, such humanists and liberals could do little.
During the years of emigration, an impeccably happy marriage came to an end. Everything changed with the arrival of the secretary, Charlotte Elizabeth Altman. For several years Zweig tossed around inside love triangle, not knowing who to choose: an aging, but still beautiful and elegant wife or a mistress - a young, but somehow plain-looking, sickly and unhappy girl. The feeling that Zweig felt for Lotte was pity rather than attraction: this pity he endowed with Anton Hofmiller, the hero of his only completed novel, Impatience of the Heart, written at that time. In 1938, the writer finally received a divorce. Once Friederike left her husband for Zweig, now he himself left her for another - this melodramatic plot could well form the basis of one of his short stories. “Internally” Zweig never completely parted with ex-wife, wrote to her that their breakup was purely external.
Loneliness approached the writer not only in family life. By the beginning of World War II, he was left without spiritual guidance. There is something feminine in Zweig’s talent and personality. The point is not only that the heroines of most of his works are women, but that he was probably one of the most subtle experts on female psychology in world literature. This femininity was manifested in the fact that Zweig was, by nature, more a follower than a leader: he constantly needed a “teacher” whom he could follow. Before the First World War, such a “teacher” for him was Verhaeren, whose poems Zweig translated into German and about whom he wrote memoirs; during the war - Romain Rolland, after it - to some extent Freud. Freud died in 1939. Emptiness surrounded the writer on all sides.
Having lost his homeland, Zweig felt like an Austrian for the first time. Last years life he writes memoirs - another escape into the past, to Austria at the beginning of the century. Another version of the “Habsburg myth” is nostalgia for the disappeared empire. A myth born of despair - as Joseph Roth said, “but you still have to admit that the Habsburgs are better than Hitler...” Unlike Roth, his close friend, Zweig became neither a Catholic nor a supporter of the imperial dynasty. And yet he created a panegyric full of painful melancholy for the “golden age of reliability”: “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed to be designed for eternity, and the state is the highest guarantor of this constancy. Everything in this vast empire stood firmly and unshakably in its place, and above everything was the old Kaiser. The nineteenth century, in its liberal idealism, was sincerely convinced that it was on the straight and narrow. on the right track to the “best of all worlds.”
Clive James, in Cultural Amnesia, called Zweig the embodiment of humanism. Franz Werfel said that Zweig's religion was humanistic optimism, faith in the liberal values of his youth. “The darkening of this spiritual sky was a shock for Zweig that he could not bear.” All this is true - it was easier for the writer to die than to come to terms with the collapse of the ideals of his youth. He ends his nostalgic passages dedicated to the liberal age of hope and progress with the characteristic phrase: “But even if it was an illusion, it was still wonderful and noble, more humane and life-giving than today’s ideals. And something deep down in my soul, despite all the experience and disappointment, prevents me from completely renouncing it. I cannot completely renounce the ideals of my youth, the belief that someday again, in spite of everything, a bright day will come.”
IN farewell letter Zweig said: “After sixty, special strength is required to start life anew. My strength is exhausted by years of wandering far from my homeland. In addition, I think that it is better now, with our heads raised, to put an end to an existence whose main joy was intellectual work, and whose highest value was personal freedom. I greet all my friends. Let them see the dawn after a long night! But I’m too impatient and leave before them.”