The human eye had never seen anything like it: for the first time, an electric light was lit - not a spark, a spark was known - namely, light, "with which dark chambers can be illuminated," as Petrov wrote. Galvanic fire, "whose dazzling brilliance on large voltaic batteries and on coals is like the sunshine," - this is where the 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 performed his experiments at night. The windows of his laboratory at the Medical-Surgical Academy overlooked the Neva. It is also known that he did not have assistants, he was alone when he first saw this light. For a month, every night a strange, trembling, still incomprehensible to the world light flashed in the laboratory windows, illuminating the coast 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, fascinates with inexhaustible invention. Legionnaires' torches smoked, torches crackled, Greek oil lamps smoked; lit candles, wax, grease, stearic, and gas lanterns, and kerosene lamps. And everywhere, in essence, the same fire was burning, preserved from the primitive fire. Civilizations, taking turns, passed it on like a baton, which, it seemed, would never end.
In the life of mankind, in the words of Stefan Zweig, there is a sidereal clock. 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 embankment of the Neva. In fact, he did not change anything, but he became the starting point.
Science has many such inspirational high points. Sometimes they are saved, these exact dates of opening. The hours of revelation are known that gave rise to the periodic table, Pasteur's conjecture, Faraday's discovery. The history of science is full of beautiful legends, starting from Archimedes, from his victory cry of "eureka!", With which he raced through the streets of Syracuse. Sometimes embellished, they crown a long hidden effort, an invisible chain of disappointments, setbacks, and thousands of rejected options. Inspiration is concentrated and discharged in a blinding, often spectacular flash that hits the reader. But long before that, unknown prehistories formed the personality of the scientist.
Archimedes became Archimedes before he exclaimed "eureka!" Only searches and mistakes are individual. The discovery itself is impersonal. The laws of nature exist independently of their identifiers, just as America existed independently of Columbus. Archimedes' law does not bear the imprint of his personality. America would not change if another had discovered it. Rather, she discovered Columbus.
But the course of the search, the journey - everyone has their own. Doubts, failures, delusions, twists of the scientist's thought - everything here depends on the personality, on the properties of talent, and character, and performance.
So, many difficulties, mistakes, repeated experiments of Faraday are explained by his poor memory, especially in the second half of his life.
The discovery itself comes, as a rule, with inexorable inevitability. The radio was created by Popov, but if it weren't for Popov, the radio would have been created by Marconi or someone else. Any discovery is inevitable. Everything that humanity possesses today had to appear. Personalities only changed the timing of events. And for the most part not very much. Regardless of Edison's genius, the light bulb would be the same today. And not "almost the same", but exactly the same. The story with the Petrov arc convinced me of the sad severity of this rule. The expression “humanity owes the scientific genius of such and such” means something completely different, and Einstein grasped this very correctly: “The moral qualities of a remarkable person are more important for his generation and for the historical process than purely intellectual achievements. These latter themselves depend on the greatness of the spirit, greatness that usually remains unknown. "
Stefan Zweig - was born on November 28, 1881 in the city of Vienna. The Austrian writer has many novels and plays on his account. 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 has its own price secretly determined.
If we all knew everything that is said about all of us, no one would talk to anyone.
The one who was once severely wounded by fate, he remains vulnerable forever.
A fool is more likely than a smart person to be evil.
You know yourself to disgust.
A woman is always forgiven for her talkativeness - but she is never forgiven for her being right.
Only a fool admires the so-called "success" with women, only a fool boasts about it. A real person is more likely to be confused when he feels that some woman is crazy about him, and he is not able to respond to her feeling.
Can you explain why people who cannot swim throw themselves 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 enmity is her vocation.
Politics and reason rarely follow the same path.
It takes a lot of effort to return faith to a person who was once deceived.
When friendship suddenly arises between a dog and a cat, it is nothing but an alliance against the cook.
Not a bad thing, first to drive a person crazy, and then to demand prudence from him!
The pathos of the posture is not a sign of greatness; one who needs poses is deceiving. Be careful with picturesque people.
If a person desires something so passionately, he will achieve his goal, God will help him.
Demanding logic from a passionately in love young woman is like looking for the sun at dead midnight. This is what distinguishes true passion, that 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 wants you; to see how the person next to you burns up in the fire of desire, and to know that you cannot help him in any way, that you do not have the strength to pull him out of this flame.
Only one thing is disgusting to me, and only one thing I hate - excuses, empty words, lies - they make me sick!
Highly summary Zweig. Each person makes many decisions during his life, but only a few can turn out to be fateful. But it also happens that one single decision of a person, taken in spite of everything, radically changes the fate of a country, a nation. Just one example from Zweig.
The commander of Napoleon's reserve army, numbering about 1/3 of all troops, has the strictest order of Napoleon not to protrude from an ambush without a written order from the chief. The name of the commander, Marshal Pears. Pears hears the whole battle of Napoleon's main army, hears his defeat, wants to go to the rescue, but does not dare to violate the order. But there is no written order, just the enemy in the valley cut the road to the couriers. Napoleon in the Alps lost his last battle and his empire collapsed.
"Reflections in front of a portrait that does not exist" author Granin Daniil Alexandrovich (excerpt)
In the life of mankind, in the words of Stefan Zweig, there is a stellar clock. The decisive peaks of time, when the events caused by the genius of one person determine the fate of civilization, the course of development of the future. The moment when the first electric light fell on the embankment of the Neva was such a starry hour. In fact, he did not change anything, but he became the starting point.
Science has a lot of such inspirational stellar hours. Sometimes they are saved, these exact dates of discovery. The hours of revelation are known that gave rise to Mendeleev's table, Pasteur's guess, and the discovery of Faraday. The history of science is full of wonderful legends, starting from Archimedes, from his victorious cry of "eureka!", With which he raced 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 dazzling, often spectacular flash that hits the reader. But long before that, unknown prehistories formed the personality of the scientist.
Archimedes became Archimedes before he exclaimed "eureka!" Only searches and errors are individual. The very discovery is impersonal. The laws of nature exist independently of their identifiers, just as America existed independently of Columbus. Archimedes' law does not bear the imprint of his personality. America would not change if it was discovered by another. Rather, she discovered Columbus.
But the course of the search, the journey - everyone has their own. Doubts, failures, delusions, twists of the scientist's thought - everything here depends on the personality, on the qualities of talent, and character, and work capacity.
Thus, many difficulties, mistakes, repeated experiments of Faraday are explained by his bad 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 it were not for Popov, radio would have been created by Marconi or someone else. Any discovery is inevitable. Everything that humanity possesses today had to appear. Personalities only changed the timing of events. And for the most part it is not very significant. Regardless of Edison's genius, the electric light bulb would be the same today. And not "almost the same", but exactly the same. The story with the Petrov arc convinced me of the sad severity of this rule. The expression "humanity owes something to the scientific genius" means something completely different, and Einstein grasped this very correctly: "The moral qualities of a remarkable person are of greater importance for his generation and for the historical process than purely intellectual achievements. These latter will depend on the greatness of the spirit. greatness that usually remains unknown. "
On February 23, 1942, newspapers around the world came out with a sensational headline on the front page: "The famous Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Charlotte committed suicide in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro." Under the headline was a photograph that looked more like a shot from a Hollywood melodrama: a dead spouse in bed. Zweig's face is peaceful and calm. Lotta touchingly put her head on her husband's shoulder and gently squeezes his hand in hers.
At a time when human slaughter was raging in Europe and the Far East, taking hundreds and thousands of lives every day, this message could not remain a sensation for long. Among his contemporaries, the writer's act aroused rather bewilderment, and in some (for example, Thomas Mann), it was simply indignation: "selfish contempt for his contemporaries." Zweig's suicide looks mysterious even after more than half a century. He was ranked among one of the shoots of that suicidal harvest that the fascist regime gathered from the fields of German-language literature. Compared with similar and almost simultaneous actions of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, Ernst Weiss, Walter Gazenklever. But there is no resemblance here (apart from, of course, the fact that all of the above were German-speaking writers - emigrants, and most of them were Jews). Weiss opened his veins when Hitler's troops entered Paris. Gazenklever, who was in the internment camp, was poisoned, fearing that he would be extradited to the German authorities. Benjamin took the poison, afraid of falling into the hands of the Gestapo: the Spanish border, on which he found himself, was closed. Toller, abandoned by his wife and penniless, hanged himself in a New York hotel.
Zweig, on the other hand, had no obvious, mundane reasons to commit suicide. 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 30 or 40 languages. By the standards of the then literary environment, he was considered a multimillionaire. Of course, from the mid-1930s the German book market was closed to him, but there were still American publishers. One of them, the day before his death, Zweig sent his last two works, neatly reprinted by Lotte: "Chess Novel" and a book of memoirs "Yesterday's World". In the writer's desk later, unfinished manuscripts were also found: a biography of Balzac, an essay about Montaigne, an unnamed novel.
Three years earlier, Zweig had married his secretary, Charlotte Altman, who was 27 years younger than him and devoted to him to death, as it turned out - literally, not figuratively. Finally, in 1940, he accepted British citizenship, a measure that got rid of the emigre ordeals with documents and visas, vividly described in Remarque's novels. Millions of people, trapped in the millstones of a giant European meat grinder, could only envy the writer, who settled comfortably in the paradise town of Petropolis and, together with his young wife, made forays to the famous carnival in Rio. The lethal dose of Veronal is usually not taken in such circumstances.
Of course, there have been many versions of the reasons for the suicide. They talked about the loneliness of the writer in foreign Brazil, longing for his native Austria, for the cozy house plundered by the Nazis in Salzburg, the famous collection of autographs plundered, about fatigue and depression. They quoted letters to my ex-wife ("I continue my work; but only to 1/4 of my strength. This is just an old habit without any creativity ...", "I'm tired of everything ...", "The best times are irretrievably gone ..."). almost maniacal fear of the writer before the fatal figure of 60 years ("I am afraid of disease, old age and addiction"). It is believed that the last straw that overflowed the cup of patience were newspaper reports about the capture of Singapore by the Japanese and the offensive of the 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 route of flight), would spread to the Western Hemisphere. The most famous explanation was given by Remarque: “People without roots were extremely unstable - chance played a decisive role in their life. If that evening in Brazil, when Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide, they could have poured out their souls, at least by 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 up in the same way as their author. Perhaps, before his death, the writer remembered his own essay about Kleist, who committed double suicide with Henrietta 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 a darling of fate, a favorite of the gods, a lucky man, a lucky one who was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth." “Perhaps I was too spoiled before,” Zweig said at the end of his life. The word "possibly" is not very appropriate here. He was lucky always and everywhere. 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. It was lucky to be born with a second son: the eldest, Alfred, inherited his father's firm, and the youngest was given the opportunity to study at the university in order to obtain a university degree and maintain a family reputation with a doctorate in some sciences.
Lucky with time and place: Vienna at the end of the 19th century, Austrian " silver Age»: Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Rilke in literature; Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern and Alban Berg in music; Klimt and "Secession" in painting; performances of the Burgtheater and the Royal Opera, Freud's psychoanalytic school ... The air saturated with high culture. “The Age of Reliability,” as the nostalgic Zweig dubbed it in his dying memoirs.
Lucky with the school. True, Zweig hated the very "training barracks" - the state gymnasium, but he ended up in a class "infected" with an interest in art: someone wrote poetry, someone drew, someone was going to become an actor, someone was engaged in music and did not miss a single concert, and someone even published articles in magazines. Later, Zweig was lucky with the university: attending lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy was free, so that he did not exhaust him with studies and exams. One could travel, live for a long time in Berlin and Paris, meet celebrities.
I was lucky during the First World War: although Zweig was drafted into the army, he was sent only to an easy job in the military archive. At the same time, the writer - a cosmopolitan and staunch pacifist - could publish anti-war articles and dramas, participate with Romain Rolland in the creation of an international organization of cultural figures who opposed the war. In 1917, the Zurich theater undertook the production of his play Jeremiah. This gave Zweig the opportunity to get a vacation and spend the end of the war in prosperous Switzerland.
Lucky with looks. In his youth, Zweig was handsome and enjoyed great success with the ladies. A long and passionate romance began with a "letter from a stranger", signed with the mysterious initials FMFV. Friderica 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 to write early, at the age of 16 he published his first aesthetic-decadent poems, 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 was brought by the works written after the war: short stories, "romanized biographies", a collection of historical miniatures "The Star Clock of Humanity", biographical sketches collected in the cycle "Builders of the World".
He considered himself a citizen of the world. Traveled all the continents, visited Africa, India and the Americas, spoke several languages. Franz Werfel said that Zweig was better prepared than anyone else for life in exile. Among the acquaintances and friends of Zweig, there were almost all European celebrities: writers, artists, politicians. However, he was demonstratively not interested in politics, believing that “in real, in real life, in the field of action of political forces, it is not outstanding minds, not carriers of pure ideas, but a much lower, but also more dexterous breed - behind-the-scenes figures, people dubious morality and a small mind ”, like Joseph Fouche, 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 world's best collections of manuscripts, 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 environment, they evoked jealousy and envy. In the words of John Fowles, "over time, the silver spoon 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 observed this agreement and left the city every summer during the festival. Others were less outspoken. 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 has penetrated into the most remote corners of the earth. Perhaps, since the time of Erasmus, no other writer has been as famous as Stefan Zweig, ”among those close to Mann called him one of the worst contemporary German writers. True, Mann's bar was not low: Feuchtwanger and Remark got into the same company along with Zweig.
"Non-Austrian Austrian, non-Jewish Jew." Zweig didn't really feel like an Austrian or a Jew. He saw himself as a European and all his life he advocated the creation of a united Europe - an insanely utopian idea in the interwar period, implemented several decades after his death.
Zweig said about himself and his parents that they "were Jews only by accident of birth." Like many prosperous, assimilated Western Jews, he had a slight contempt for the "Ostjuden" - immigrants from the impoverished settlements of the Pale of Settlement, who followed the traditional way of life and spoke Yiddish. When Herzl tried to recruit Zweig to work in the Zionist movement, he flatly refused. In 1935, while 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 fact, 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 physical homeland.
It is difficult for the reader of Zweig to believe in the fact that he lived until 1942, survived two world wars, several revolutions and the onset of fascism, that he traveled all over the world. It seems that his life stopped somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, and that he has never been outside Central Europe. The action of almost all of his short stories and novel takes place in the pre-war period, as a rule, in Vienna, less often in some European resorts. It seems that Zweig in his work tried 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 original works - a couple of dozen short stories and two novels. Zweig's historical interests were not unusual, the entire German literature of his time was embraced by a "thirst for history" (critic W. Schmidt-Dengler): Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Emil Ludwig ... The era of wars and revolutions required historical comprehension. “When such great events in history take place, I don’t want to invent in art,” Zweig said.
The peculiarity of Zweig is that history was reduced for him to separate, decisive, crisis moments - "finest hours", "truly historical, great and unforgettable moments." At such hours, the unknown captain of the engineering troops Rouge de Lisle creates the Marseillaise, the adventurer Vasco Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean, and because of the indecision of Marshal Pears, the fate of Europe changes. Zweig also noted such historical moments in his life. So, 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 sent into exile. He also collected autographs of celebrities for a reason, but was looking for those manuscripts that would express a moment of inspiration, creative enlightenment of a genius, which would allow "to comprehend in the relic of the manuscript that which made immortals immortal for the world."
Zweig's novellas are also stories of one “fantastic night”, “24 hours from life”: a concentrated moment when the latent possibilities of the personality, the dormant abilities and passions in it, burst out. The biographies of Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette are stories about how "an ordinary, everyday life turns into a tragedy of ancient proportions," the average person turns out to be worthy of greatness. Zweig believed that every person has a certain innate, "demonic" principle, which drives him beyond his own personality, "to danger, to the unknown, to the risk." It was this breakthrough of a dangerous - or sublime - part of our soul that he loved to portray. He called one of his biographical trilogies “Fighting the Demon”: Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, “Dionysian” natures, completely subordinate to the “demon's power” and opposed to the harmonious Olympian Goethe.
Zweig's paradox is the lack of clarity as to which "literary class" it should be attributed to. He considered himself a "serious writer", but it is obvious that his works are rather high-quality mass literature: melodramatic plots, entertaining biographies of celebrities. According to Steven Spender, Zweig's main readership was middle-class teens from European families - they eagerly read stories about "burning secrets" and passions hidden behind the respectable facade of bourgeois society: sexual attraction, fear, mania and madness. Many of Zweig's novellas seem to be illustrations of Freud's studies, which is not surprising: they revolved in the same circles, described the same solid and respectable crowns, hiding a bunch of subconscious complexes under the guise of decency.
For all its brightness and external brilliance, something elusive, unclear is felt in Zweig. He was rather a closed person. His works are by no means autobiographical. “Your things are only a third of your personality,” the 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. 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 background, in the background, performing purely official functions. Strange as it may seem, the writer gave his own features to far from the most pleasant of his characters: the annoying collector of celebrities in "Impatience of the Heart" or the writer in "A Letter from a Stranger." All of this is more reminiscent of a samosharzh - perhaps unconscious and not even noticed by Zweig himself.
In general, Zweig is a writer with a double bottom: if you wish, you can find associations with Kafka in his most classic works - that's 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 Transformation, only without any phantasmagoria, and the reasoning about the judgment in Fear seems to be borrowed from The Trial. Critics have long noticed the similarity of the plot lines of The Chess Novel with Nabokov's Luzhin. Well, and the famous romantic "Letter from a Stranger" in the era of postmodernism is tempting to read in the spirit of Priestley's "Inspector's Visit": a prank that created a story of great love from several random women.
Zweig's literary fate is a mirror version of the romantic legend about an unrecognized artist whose talent remained invaluable by his contemporaries and was recognized only after his death. In the case of Zweig, everything turned out exactly the opposite: according to Fowles, "Stefan Zweig had a chance to endure, after his death in 1942, the most complete oblivion compared to any other 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 absolute. By at least in two countries, Zweig's popularity has never declined. These countries are France and, oddly enough, Russia. Why Zweig was so loved in the USSR (in 1928-1932 his collected works in 12 volumes were published) is a mystery. The liberal and humanist Zweig had nothing in common with the communists and fellow travelers loved 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 house in Salzburg, located near the German border, a view of Berchtesgaden, the Führer's favorite residence, opened up. In 1934 Zweig left Austria - four years before the Anschluss. The formal pretext was a desire to work in the British archives on the story of Mary Stuart, but deep down he knew that he would not return.
During these years, he writes about lone idealists, Erasmus and Castellio, who opposed fanaticism and totalitarianism. In today's Zweig's 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 about inside a love triangle, not knowing whom to choose: an aging, but still beautiful and elegant wife, or a mistress - a young, but some nondescript, sickly and unhappy girl. The feeling that Zweig felt for Lotte was more pity than attraction: he endowed with this pity Anton Hoffmiller, the hero of his only completed novel, Impatience of the Heart, written at that time. In 1938, the writer still received a divorce. Once Frederick 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 did not part with his ex-wife to the end, he wrote to her that their break was purely external.
Loneliness was impending on the writer not only in family life. By the beginning of the Second World War, he was left without spiritual guidance. There is something feminine in the talent and personality of Zweig. The point is not only that the heroines of most of his works are women, that he was probably one of the most subtle connoisseurs of female psychology in world literature. This femininity was manifested in the fact that Zweig was in essence more a follower than a leader: he constantly needed a "teacher" to follow. Before the First World War, such a "teacher" for him was Verhaarn, whose poems Zweig translated into German and about whom he wrote memoirs; during the war - Romain Rolland, after it - to some extent Freud. In 1939 Freud died. Emptiness surrounded the writer from 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" - nostalgia for the vanished 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 did not become a Catholic or a supporter of the imperial dynasty. And yet he created a panegyric full of agonizing anguish to the “golden age of reliability”: “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed to be calculated for eternity, and the state is the supreme guarantor of this constancy. Everything in this vast empire stood firmly and unshakably in its place, and above everything - the old Kaiser. The nineteenth century, in its liberal idealism, was sincerely convinced that it was on the straight and correct path to "the best of worlds."
Clive James in Cultural Amnesia called Zweig the embodiment of humanism. Franz Werfel said that Zweig's religion was humanistic optimism, a belief in liberal values \u200b\u200bduring his youth. "The obscurity of this spiritual sky was a shock for Zweig that he could not bear." All this is really so - it was easier for the writer to pass away than to come to terms with the collapse of the ideals of his youth. He concludes the 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 in the depths of the soul, despite all the experience and disappointment, prevents one from completely abandoning it. I cannot completely renounce the ideals of my youth, from the belief that someday again, in spite of everything, a bright day will come. "
In his farewell letter, Zweig said: “After sixty, special strength is required to start life anew. My strength is depleted by years of wandering far from my homeland. In addition, I think that it is better now, with your head raised, to put an end to existence, the main joy of which was intellectual work, and the highest value - personal freedom. I greet all my friends. May they see the dawn after a long night! And I am too impatient and leave before them. "
STEPHAN ZWEIG was born and raised in Vienna, in a wealthy bourgeois family, received an excellent education, and became known early as a writer. At thirty, his fame crossed the borders of the countries of the German language and rather quickly made him a noticeable figure in European and world literature. A thoughtful and honest artist, Zweig defended humanistic ideals with all his work. But his worldview, marked by liberalism, was an unreliable and fragile weapon, unable to protect the views of the writer from the cruelty of the world. At the very beginning of his literary career, Stefan Zweig tried his hand at poetry, drama and novel. Early works carried the imprint of various influences: symbolism, impressionism. But already at this time, Zweig's gravitation towards realistic manner letters, most clearly manifested in the novelism of the early period. In 1914 Zweig became close to Romain Rolland, with whom he was united by an anti-militarist position. In 1919 Zweig joined the Klarte literary group, which supported the young Soviet republic. Speaking in defense of world culture from the emerging fascism, Zweig in the 20s. began to write biographical sketches, mainly about the great people of the past. These works in 1920-1928. he united under the general name "Builders of the World". After Nazi Germany occupied Austria, Zweig emigrated in 1938, first to England, then to South America, where he committed suicide. The feat of Magellan (Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat. 1938) - a book describing the era of great geographical discoveries, is one of the best works of Stefan Zweig. Its action takes place at a time when Portugal becomes a maritime power and promotes great people to the world arena. In the center of the narrative is Magellan, a man of great will, daring and courage, who has made a voyage of incredible difficulty. The integral and vivid image of Magellan is one of Zweig's greatest creative successes. Impatience of the Heart (Ungeduld des Herzens. 1939) is a novel set on the eve of the 1914 war. Lieutenant Hoffmiller stands with his regiment in a garrison town in Hungary. Tired of boredom, he gladly accepts the invitation of the landowner Kekescal, welcome to him at the village ball. Here he meets the daughter of the owner of the house. This rich girl suffers from a severe disease: she is paralyzed. The unexpected attention of the young officer makes an extraordinary impression on the patient. She falls passionately in love with him and reveals her feelings to him. Goffmiller lacks the courage to reject her love, and the engagement is celebrated at the castle. However, Hoffmiller cannot overcome the horror of the thought that he will have to marry a cripple, become a laughing stock in the eyes of his colleagues. He is slowly transferred to another regiment and suddenly disappears from the bride's house. The deceived girl commits suicide. During the war, tormented by remorse, Hoffmiller shows special courage and seeks death in battle. Novels are one of the favorite genres of the writer. External events in the novels serve only as a pretext or impetus for the development or turn of psychological intrigue. The creative handwriting of the novelist Zweig took shape in the early 1920s. The plot tension of the short stories is determined not by the dynamics of the action, but by the skillful transfer of the spiritual movements of the heroes, a subtle and accurate analysis of their inner state. Many of the novels are built on the depiction of a psychological conflict that was built up gradually and with great skill. So, in the short story "Invisible Collection" Zweig tells about a disabled person who lost his sight in the war. For several decades, the blind man has been collecting old drawings and engravings and constitutes a truly priceless collection. One day a large antiquarian comes to him, and the blind man proudly shows him his collection, not suspecting that he is showing absolutely blank sheets to the shocked visitor. He does not even know that his daughter and wife sold all his luxurious originals a long time ago, during the years of inflation, and that only in this way they managed not to starve to death. In the short story "Amok" Stefan Zweig showed the death of a woman entangled in a web of lies, prejudice and deception. For fear of scandal and "shame", this woman is entrusted to ignoramuses and charlatans and dies. In "A Letter from a Stranger" Zweig tells about a pure and beautiful woman who loyally and selflessly loved a callous self-lover all her life, who did not understand that he passed, like a blind man, past great feelings. One of Zweig's best short stories - "The Episode on Lake Geneva" - reveals the tragedy of a Russian prisoner of war who, after making sure that he would not be allowed to return to his homeland, committed suicide. The sidereal clock of humanity (Sternstunden der Menschheit. 1928) - a collection of stories. In twelve historical miniatures, Zweig uses the most significant episodes from recent history, which he called the "finest hours" of humanity. The first short story in the collection - "A Moment of Waterloo" - reveals the tragedy of Marshal Grusha. According to Napoleon's orders, he was supposed to chase on the heels of the defeated Prussian army, but, having lost sight of the enemy and looking for him, he was late on the battlefield. Meanwhile, it was his participation in the battle that was supposed to decide the outcome of the battle. Not receiving help in time, Napoleon's army was defeated. Napoleon's finest hour was over. The short story "Marienbad Elegy" tells about Goethe's finest hour, about the birth of an amazing poem in which the genius poet expressed the sorrow and greatness of his last love. The Discovery of Eldorado depicts tragic fate General Zutter, the first European to enter the land of California and fall victim to the gold rush. From a strong and brave man, Sutter turned into a miserable, insane beggar. In the miniature "The Heroic Moment" Zweig captured the image of Dostoevsky in those minutes when he was awaiting execution. The final story is devoted to the conquest of the South Pole. Overcoming the obstacles in the way by inhuman efforts, Captain Scott and his companions reach the South Pole on January 18, 1912. Here they are convinced that Amundsen was ahead of them. They die on the way back, no longer able to fight the elements. This is also the finest hour of mankind, an hour that will serve as a great example for future generations. Zweig's historical miniatures are perfect in composition, style and language. He puts some of these miniatures in the form of an epic story written in transparent prose, others he builds as dramatic scenes or sets out in verse.