Zweig and his novels

Text/Ma Jiajun

Stephen Zweig (188l–1942) was a well-known Austrian novelist and biographer.

Zweig was born on 28 December 1881 in Vienna to a Jewish family of factory owners. He loved literature from an early age and began to write poetry under the influence of the neo-romanticism and symbolism of Rilke and others in his teens. In 1900 Zweig entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he continued to write poetry. At this time, he published the poetry collection Silver Strings (1901), which symbolically wrote hazy impressions and moods. In 1904, Zweig passed the doctoral examination with his dissertation on Tenner. He then worked as an editor of the Newspaper New Liberty and traveled extensively to Western Europe, North Africa, India and the United States. Over the years he became acquainted with Rodin, Vilhallen, Romain Rolland and translated the works of the latter two, baudelaire and Dostoevsky, into German. Before World War I, he published the poetry collection Garland of the Past (1906), the tragedy Tercitus (1907), the novel collection The First Experience (1911), and the play The Changeable Comedian (1913).

After the outbreak of the First World War, Zweig was also conscripted into the army, and in 1915 he served in the military service, working at the Vienna Military Archive, and soon after he went into exile in Switzerland, engaged in the peace movement with Romain Rolland, joined the "Society of Light" in Babise, and published the anti-war play Jeremia (19l7). After 1919, Zweig lived in seclusion in Salzburg, Germany, for a long time, engaged in creative activities. The 1920s were a prolific period for Zweig, and in addition to the tragedy Volepony (1927), he wrote mainly biographies and short stories. Zweig is famous for his biographies, including Three Masters (1920), a biography of the great novelists Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, Roman Roland (1921), a description of his admired contemporaries, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche's Struggle against the Elves (1925), a commentary on the eminent figures of his German compatriots, and The Three Poets Who Described His Life (1928), a biography of Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. In these biographies, Zweig uses literary image thinking to carefully portray the personalities, characters and temperaments of these great writers, and writes them vividly. The production, significance, and achievements of their famous works were correctly evaluated. These biographies combine the characteristics of literary criticism and image description. Zweig's biography, as well as Psychotherapy (1931), published before going abroad. The book is written about the life of Dr. Messmer, the inventor of Austrian hypnosis, Mary Baker-Eddie, the founder of "Christian Science", and the psychiatric psychologist Freud. Zweig's collection of short stories in the 1920s included Mad Malays (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Turning Point in Man's Destiny (1927), and many more. His novels are deep and timeless, artistically to the point of pure fire.

In 1928, Zweig was invited to visit the Soviet Union and met Gorky, who had just returned to China, and Gorky repeatedly praised Zweig's novel skills and the writer's deep and melancholy mood reflected in the novel. His correspondence with Gorky (1) is an important document for the study of the ideas and art of both sides.

Hitler came to power in 1933. Zweig fled to England the following year and immediately became British. In the 1930s, his biographies wrote about renaissance Dutch, British, and French historical figures, notably The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus rotterdam (1935), Maria Stuart (1935), castro against Calvin (1936), and so on. Zweig rarely wrote novels, but in 1938 he published Anxious Hearts. The novel is about the love affair of a paralyzed teenage girl who falls on the path of suicide after falling out of love. The author carefully analyzes and describes her ever-changing inner hidden state, revealing the bitterness and despair of disabled youth in capitalist society, with a profound critical spirit. During his seclusion in England, he also published a collection of essays, Unexpected Encounters (1937).

In 1940, the fascists invaded Western Europe, and the British Isles could not escape shelling and bombing. To avoid the war, he and his wife fled to Brazil in 1941. Here he wrote his last short story on the subject of anti-fascism, The Story of Chess (1941).

On February 22, 1942, at the age of 60, Zweig wrote his Book of Despair in Petro paulis, near Rio de Janeiro, saying: "The world in which my own language prevails has sunk for me, and my spiritual homeland, Europe, has destroyed itself,...... My energy has been drained from years of homeless wandering. Therefore, I think it is best to end this life in a timely manner with a just attitude, and to end my life, which has always regarded spiritual work as the purest happiness and personal freedom as the most precious treasure in the world. The next day, Zweig committed suicide with his wife. Posthumous works include his later memoir The World of Yesterday (1942), about life in Germany, Austria, and Europe during World War II, and Balzac (1946), which was unfinished for more than a decade.

Zweig's most accomplished and popular composition is his short and medium stories. Its most striking feature is their profound psychological analysis, which shows that the writer is a holy hand who perceives the subtle changes in the minds of the characters and their deep mysteries and can express them beautifully and delicately. In "The Governess", the novel depicts the story of a rich family's children seducing and abandoning weak women through the perspective of a pair of little girls. In "The Burning Secret", a 12-year-old boy follows his mother's affair with a baron, describing the mood of the child who has just solved the personnel. These novels delicately portray the psychological state of children, and are written in Wei Miao Wei Xiao. The novel "Fear" writes that a woman who meets her lover is repeatedly blackmailed by a strange woman, and lives in fear in order not to let her husband know. Later, she confessed her private affair to her husband and learned that her husband had hired an actress to torture her. The novel profoundly reveals the wife's psychological changes from fear to the brink of mental breakdown to the determination to confess to her husband.

Zweig's novels, when writing about mental activity, are more about sexual impulses and secret passions. Zweig was a great believer in Freud's teachings. In his novels involving love and the relationship between men and women, he deliberately describes the sexual psychology of the characters. A European doctor in the middle of nowhere in rural Indonesia confronts an arrogant caucasian woman who has come to have an abortion and imagines his womb and his union with her (The Man with Tropical Epilepsy); an idle baron faces a woman's fleshy figure at the racecourse and thinks of something wrong ("Wonderful Night") ... Such uncontrolled psychological impulses that are beyond the times and have no specific background show the author's idealism in the macroscopic world of social movements and the realism of the psychological microscopic world.

Zweig's novels about sexual psychology are not entirely without social significance. The author is sympathetic to the performance of true love in an evil society. "A Letter from a Strange Woman" (a translation of "Wu Shan Yun") writes about the heroine's state of mind towards her lover who neglected her: at the age of 13, her heart began to be maddened, and at the age of 18, she committed herself to people with joy and fear and fell into a prostitute after giving birth to an illegitimate child, and still did not forget to cherish the writer. Gorky said: "I don't know of any artist who can describe women with such a respectful and considerate attitude toward women", and praised the novel's "superb and touching". The novel does not simply describe the psychology of love, but criticizes the writer's irresponsible bourgeois attitude towards life. "24 Hours of a Woman's Life" writes that the heroine looks at the hands and face of a young man in a daze, and later involuntarily spends the night with this stranger in a small hotel. Here we are not writing about intoxicated love, but about the depravity of the incorrigible gambler and the corrosion and strangulation of youth by capitalist casinos.

The lyricism and humanitarian spirit of Zweig's psychological novels are combined in many novels against war and fascism. This kind of novel does not have a love description, but from a humanitarian point of view, it describes the fate and inner world of the insulted and damaged, and shows the author's sympathy and indignation. The Russian who committed suicide in "The Interlude on the Shores of Lake Geneva" was driven to the French front, and he escaped and swam across Lake Geneva, but his homeland was out of reach and he finally lost his life in a foreign country. A regular visitor to a coffee shop in Mendel, the Old Bookseller, has a superhuman memory and is a living library that has greatly helped researchers. He only cared about the sale of old books and did not provoke anyone, but he was caught by the gendarmes, considered to be an enemy spy, and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Later, despite being released, he became a waste. Zweig complained about the disasters that war brought to ordinary people, and "The Invisible Treasure" wrote about the misfortunes of the people after the war. The war caused inflation, and the wives and daughters of the old collectors sold their precious pictures in secret for their livelihoods; the blind old man touched the empty album and praised the exquisite treasures of the world. It shows the pain in the depths of the author's soul. "The Story of Chess" exposes Hitler's fárism of human nature, using a side-by-side writing. It is written about Dr. B, who defeated the world chess champion, who was originally an innocent person imprisoned by the fascists in a single room to torture his will. Dr. B, however, derives the strength to persevere in the struggle from the chess book, and also achieves schizophrenia in the process of self-confrontation. The combination of advanced chess skills and fascist torture shows the kitchique of Zweig's novel conception.

Zweig's novels are artistically exquisite, cleverly conceived, legendary, and good at creating suspense. The first-person confession of personal experience and subconscious psychological activities is often used to make the image of the novel highly three-dimensional and transparent. The analysis of individual chapters and paragraphs is too cumbersome, and the bloated description of lust is its inadequacy.

[Note]

(1) See Gorky, Zweig, and Romain Roland, The Book of the Three, Hunan People's Publishing House, 1980. The following quotations from Gao and Z are all found in this book, without further comment.

(Note: The author of this article has authorized this headline)

(Ma Jiajun, a native of Qingyuan, Hebei, born on October 5, 1929, is currently a professor at the College of Literature of Shaanxi Normal University, a member of the Chinese Writers Association, a member of the Chinese Dramatists Association, a member of the Chinese Filmmakers Association, an honorary president (former president) of the Shaanxi Foreign Literature Society, a principle of the Chinese Foreign Literature Society, a principle of the Chinese Russian Literature Research Society, a former president of the Shaanxi Provincial Higher Education Drama Research Society, a former consultant of the Shaanxi Poetry Society, and a former executive director of the Shaanxi Provincial Federation of Social Science Societies. Shaanxi Province to build socialist spiritual civilization advanced individuals, Shaanxi Province to teach and educate advanced teachers, etc., enjoy special allowances from the State Council.

He is the author of 12 kinds of "Nineteenth Century Russian Literature", "The New Stage of Aesthetic History", "Poetry Exploration", "Exploration of World Literature", etc.; 4 kinds of "The Essence of World Literature" and "History of Western Drama" co-authored with his daughter Ma Xiaoyi; 9 kinds of "History of World Literature" (3 volumes) and "Research on Gorky's Creation"; edited 4 kinds of "30 Lectures on European and American Modernist Literature"; co-edited and co-authored "100 Topics of Marxism-Leninism", "Cultural Research Methods", "50 Lectures on Oriental Literature", "Western Literature in the Twentieth Century", etc. and more than 40 kinds.

It has been listed in more than 40 kinds, such as the Dictionary of Chinese Writers, the Dictionary of Chinese Poets, the Dictionary of Chinese Social Science Scholars, the Cambridge Dictionary of International Biographies (27th Edition in English), the Directory of Experts in Russian Studies Abroad (Russian Edition) of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Classics of Shaanxi Century of Literature and Art. ）