Zweig, who committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, is an object of current fascination and the subject of a new biographical study.
Photo
Stefan
Zweig (1881-1942).CreditHulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
In the decades
between the two world wars, no writer was more widely translated or read than
the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, and in the years after, few writers fell
more precipitously into obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world. But
now Zweig, prolific storyteller and embodiment of a vanished Mitteleuropa,
seems to be back, and in a big way.
New editions of his
fiction, including his collected stories, are being published, with some
appearing in English for the first time. Movies are being adapted from his
writing; a new selection of his letters is in the works; plans to reissue his
many biographies and essays are in motion; and his complicated life has
provided inspiration for new biographies and a best-selling French novel.
“Seven years ago,
when I told friends who are writers what I was going to be doing, they looked
at me with silence and incomprehension,” said George Prochnik, the author of
“The Impossible Exile,” a biographical study of Zweig’s final years, published
this month by Other Press. “But Zweig has become an object of fascination
again.”
Ralph Fiennes in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” set in Europe
between the wars, the milieu of much of Stefan Zweig’s work. CreditFox Searchlight
Pictures
Born in Vienna in
1881, into a prosperous Jewish family, Zweig grew up in what he would later
describe as a “golden age of security.” Success and acclaim came to him early
and never left, but the rise of Nazism forced him into a painful and enervating
exile, first in Britain, then the United States and, finally Brazil, where he
and his wife, Lotte, committed suicide in February 1942.
The reasons for
Zweig’s resurgence at this particular moment are not necessarily obvious, and
that has provoked much speculation in literary circles. Zweig was, in many
ways, an old-fashioned writer: His fiction relies heavily on plot, with some
developments telegraphed long before they occur, and the tales he tells are
often melodramatic, their language sometimes florid.
But that
conventionality of structure and tone is accompanied by insights into
character, emotion and motivation that were unusual, even revelatory, for their
time and continue to resonate today. Not surprisingly, Zweig and Sigmund Freud
were friends and mutual admirers — Zweig even delivered a eulogy at Freud’s
funeral — and one of his eternal themes was the workings of the human mind.
At an event at the
McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo last week, the authors André Aciman, Katie
Kitamura and Anka Muhlstein joined Mr. Prochnik in a discussion of what made
Zweig relevant and appealing to modern readers. They immediately zeroed in on
that perspicacity.
“The man is an
absolutely brilliant psychologist,” Mr. Aciman said, placing Zweig at the head
of a group of writers who “are very pointed in their ability to understand what
makes human beings tick.” Ms. Kitamura added that Zweig was particularly astute
in “the way he handles women” and their yearnings and frustrations.
There also appears
to be an element of nostalgic curiosity in the renewed interest in Zweig,
especially as the centennial of the outbreak of World War I approaches. He
called his memoir, published in 1942 and reissued in paperback last year, “The
World of Yesterday,” and some of his best-known works take place in elegant,
long-vanished settings, like ocean liners, spas in the Alps or a cavalry
regiment serving on the frontier of the Hapsburg Empire, a world evoked by Wes
Anderson in his recent film “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
“I think it partly
can be attributed to a larger ongoing interest in the disaster of the 20th
century and taking its pulse,” said Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York
Review Books Classics, which has published Zweig’s novel “Beware of Pity” and
four of his novellas in recent years. “Zweig was both a chronicler of that
world and a victim of the disaster, which makes him an intriguing figure.”
Some of the most
recent interest obviously stems from Mr. Anderson’s film. He acknowledges
Zweig’s work as inspiration, and the film, whose main character, played by
Ralph Fiennes, even looks like Zweig, addresses some of the questions that
preoccupied the writer, like the emergence of borders, passports and other
impediments to mobility and freedom.
“The interest was
already there, but it has accelerated hugely” since Mr. Anderson’s film opened
at the Berlin Film Festival in February, said Adam Freudenheim, managing
director of Pushkin Books, which has published more than a score of Zweig
titles. “It’s not just about the film being seen. It’s also the fact that
people are hearing and talking about Zweig on social media in a way that wasn’t
true six months ago, and that has a direct impact on our sales.”
In “The Society of
the Crossed Keys,” a sort of companion book to his film that is available in
Britain but not yet in the United States, Mr. Anderson selects some of his
favorite passages from Zweig’s work and, in a conversation with Mr. Prochnik,
explains what about them appeals to him. Zweig provides “details of a universe
most of us have no experience of, and that’s great to discover,” he says in
their conversation.
In his lifetime,
Zweig’s easily digestible style and penchant for short works made him an author
whose writing was frequently adapted to film. More than 70 movies have been
made from his stories. “Letter
From an Unknown Woman,” a disturbing account of obsession and
what today would be considered stalking, was filmed four times and also made
into an opera.
Even before Mr.
Anderson’s film, that seemed to be happening again: “A Promise,” an adaptation of “Journey
Into the Past,” directed by Patrice Leconte, was released last month, and
another French director, Bernard Attal, has made “The Invisible Collection,” in which
Zweig’s story of the same name is adapted to modern-day Brazil.
In continental
Europe, where Zweig never quite disappeared the way he did in the
English-speaking world, there are other signs of revived interest. Laurent
Seksik’s novel“The Last Days,” a French-language
account of Zweig’s final six months, recently published in the United States by
the Pushkin Press, has been a best seller there, and Volker Weidermann’s “Ostend: 1936, Summer of Friendship,” a
German-language study of Zweig’s relationship with his fellow Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, has just been
published to strongly positive reviews.
The enthusiasm about
Zweig is by no means universal, as evidenced by a notorious takedown in The
London Review of Books in 2010, in which the poet, critic and translator
Michael Hofmann described Zweig’s work as “putrid” and
dismissed him as “the Pepsi of Austrian writers.” But even Mr. Hofmann’s
outpouring ended up contributing to Zweig’s greater visibility.
Zweig may also be
benefiting from Anthea Bell’s sparkling new translations. Ms. Bell, who
previously translated the Asterix comic books and the fairy tales of Hans
Christian Andersen, has been praised for bringing a crisper, more contemporary
tone to Zweig.
The Brazilian writer Alberto
Dines, who met Zweig as a child and is the author of the biography
“Death in Paradise: The Tragedy of Stefan Zweig,” notes that this is not the
first Zweig revival. There was also a flicker of interest after World War
II, with the posthumous publication of Zweig’s late work, and again
around 1981, at the centennial of his birth.
The difference this
time, Mr. Dines argues, is that the current round of what he calls Zweigmania
runs the risk of “creating a mythology that subtly transforms him into a
character in one of his own stories,” with fiction and reality confused.
It is perhaps best
to think of Zweig, he continued, as an apostle of “pacifism, tolerance and
fellowship” who, in the end, was overwhelmed by the ascent of obscurantism.
“Every generation has its own Zweig,” he said, “and this is ours, the fruit of
an imprecise nostalgia and yearning.”
A version of this article appears in print on
May 29, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Austrian Novelist Rises Anew.
Video com Alberto Dines sobre a Casa Stefan Zweig em Petropolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dc_ZSEl_Uw