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Stefan Zweig, Austrian Novelist, Rises Again - (The New York Times)

Stefan Zweig, Austrian Novelist, Rises Again

By LARRY ROHTER - The New York Times, MAY 28, 2014

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.”

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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

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