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Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
Zweig devoted ten years of research and writing to Balzac, which he regarded as his crowning achievement. This late work reads like a picaresque novel, with Balzac’s quest for “a woman with a fortune” and recurrent episodes of the author chasing an elusive pot of gold driving the story. This biography of one classic author by another is filled with Zweig’s characteristic psychological insights. He portrays the energy and “exuberance of imagination” that produced some two thousand characters in La comédie humaine, as well as the daily details of the coffee-chugging writer’s life, his manic writing schedule, method of correcting proofs, dealing with publishers and reviewers, signing contracts, doing marketing and publicity. Balzac blends biography and literary history in a highly readable volume that will teach you French cultural history as you laugh out loud. “[Balzac] is sure to entertain, instruct and charm ... It is a work of art, ... alive with the teeming life of its model ... It is true both to facts and to the more elusive psychological and spiritual truth of a man who ... has remained one of the most mysterious of great creators.” – Henri Peyre, Sterling professor of French Literature, Yale University, The New York Times
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351314866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world. Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures. Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book.
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 115
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Book Description
This is the third essay of Stefan Zweig’s Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, written in the early 20th century. Part biography, part literary criticism, part cultural history, the essay offers a window onto how a Central European regarded the Russian master, who died in 1881, the year Zweig was born. Dostoevsky’s genius, in Zweig’s view, owed a debt to his illness, as Tolstoy’s did to his radiant health. Illness “enabled Dostoevsky to soar upward into a sphere of such concentrated feeling as is rarely experienced by normal men; it permitted him to penetrate into the underworld of the emotions, into the submerged regions of the psyche.” This essay is one of the best examples of Zweig’s psychologically-informed literary criticism.
Author: Judith Gunn
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445658488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
An intriguing study of the life and works of one of the world's most celebrated writers
Author: Victor Weisskopf
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In the 1930s, Victor Weisskopf worked with leading European physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli. His memoir recounts in simple language how quantum mechanics revolutionized physics and our understanding of matter. Weisskopf takes us to Los Alamos where he worked on the atom bomb during World War II after fleeing the Nazis, to CERN which he led in the early 1960s, and to MIT’s physics department where he taught until his retirement. Weisskopf also recounts his efforts towards nuclear disarmament and tells of his lifelong love of music and passion to understand and explain physics. “[Weisskopf’s] memoir provides a bright tile in the mosaic that our descendants will study in seeking to understand his scientific generation... A warm and frequently witty memoir by an extraordinarily gifted thinker and caring human being.” — Timothy Ferris, The New York Times “Weisskopf’s voice comes through clearly in the book ... a voice that has tried to infuse our century with the idealism and humanism that it so often has lacked... The Joy of Insight is much more than Weisskopf’s autobiography: It is a first-hand account of the intellectual and political forces that shaped the 20th century.” — Science “His account of [Los Alamos], where an isolated, tightly enclosed social world contrasted with the excitement and suspense of unprecedented research and invention, is the best yet written.” — The Atlantic “The Joy of Insight is an inspiring personal memoir by one of the most thoughtful scientists of our time... [A] stimulating book by and about a passionate physicist.” —Boston Globe “[Weisskopf] emerges in this autobiography as a man of gentle wisdom and quiet grace, confident in the idea that physics can provide not only 'the joy of insight,' but also a model of how life should be lived.” — The Sciences
Author: Frederic V. Grunfeld
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 901
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Book Description
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was not only the world’s greatest sculptor, known for such works as The Thinker, The Kiss, The Hand of God, and dozens of others, but also one of the most remarkable personalities of modern times: an artist who outraged contemporaries with his disturbingly unfinished monuments; a sensualist who shocked France with his scandalous relationships (among others, with Camille Claudel); and a friend to the most gifted writers and artists of his day. “A consistently absorbing story... Mr. Grunfeld is primarily concerned with setting out — insofar as they can be separated from the art — the facts of the sculptor’s life, and within his chosen limits he has written a rewarding and illuminating book.” — John Gross, The New York Times “An excellent job... will undoubtedly serve as an excellent biography of the artist.” — Benedict Read, The New York Times “Rodin finally has a biography worthy of his achievements.” — Washington Post Book World “Grunfeld’s rigorously researched and gracefully written biography of Rodin is, by far, the best in its field.” — Robert Taylor, Boston Globe “Rodin’s creative life is vividly recaptured [by Grunfeld]... No previous biography has so clearly placed him amid his colleagues and assorted friends — Victor Hugo, George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marie Curie, James McNeill Whistler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isadora Duncan, and many others. Nor has any placed him in the raking light of his vanity, many amours (an epic in itself) and the sexual instincts inseparable from his work.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer “Grunfeld has rescued Rodin from the twin mythic images of heroic, possessed demigod or sex-obsessed bohemian... This remarkably intimate portrait should win awards.” — Publishers Weekly “Grunfeld's book shines out. It is an excellent general biography... seamlessly written and almost un-put-downable. He skilfully covers not only Rodin's personal history but also his work and the world he lived in.” — Benedict Read, The Spectator “A vibrant biography of the great French sculptor... With all the naturalistic detail of Zola and the color of canvases by Monet, Grunfeld chronicles Rodin’s rocky career... That this exhaustive book is never dull is something of a feat... Grunfeld’s Rodin, modeled in high relief against his place and time, emerges not so much a statuary monument as a three-dimensional man.” — Kirkus Review “Well researched... A marvelous roster of personalities, politicians, writers, and artists of the time pass through the pages of the book, placing Rodin in the mainstream of the cultural life of the Third Republic.” — Gerald M. Ackerman, Los Angeles Times
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Written in the 1920s, Zweig's work of literary criticism and biography might today be titled Masters of Memoir. In it, Stefan Zweig – one of the 20th century’s most widely-published writers – describes the creative process and work of authors for whom no subject is as compelling as the material of their own lives. Adepts in Self-Portraiture examines the lives and work of three men who represent, in Zweig's view, three levels of development in autobiographical writing. The first and most basic level is evinced by Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian womanizer who records his sexual and social conquests, adventures and escapes, without attempting to analyze or even reflect on them. The second level of self-portraiture is exemplified by Stendhal, the French pioneer of psychological fiction, who kept voluminous notebooks on his own experience of life and on whom no nuance of feeling seems to have been lost. Russian master Leo Tolstoy represents the third and highest level of autobiographical writing in which the psychological is imbued with the spiritual and ethical. In Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Stefan Zweig examines the impulses that give rise to life writing and anticipates the current popularity of the memoir form.
Author: Egon Erwin Kisch
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Sensation Fair: Tales of Prague (Marktplatz der Sensationen) is the memoir of the writer who elevated journalism to the status of literature in 20th century Europe. Taking his cue from the blind Czech balladeer who sang in the courtyard of his family’s Prague apartment in the 1890s, Egon Erwin Kisch created a body of work based in fact. Kisch wrote Sensation Fair in Mexico during his exile from Nazi-occupied Europe as Stefan Zweig was writing The World of Yesterday in Brazil. Although the writers were Central European Jewish contemporaries, they could not have been more different. Sensation Fair is the memoir of a former police reporter and dedicated Communist. His rollicking, ironic, muckraking portrait of turn-of-the century Prague is a passionate argument for the value of non-fiction narrative. “delightfully and cleverly done, with dozens of good yarns and stories in it ... He writes with a touch and a wit of his own.” — The New York Times “Sensation Fair is brisk story and haunting picture of a youth in old Prague, journalism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire ... conspicuously varied both in substance and mood. Egon Erwin Kisch can see life and write of it with incisive concentration and romantic allusiveness, tenderness and ribaldry, humor and candor and scorn ... a lively and mellow picture, personal and not too nostalgic, of a bygone world.” — The New York Times “One feels in the presence of this book, as in the presence of the author himself, a richness and zest that cannot be defeated in the most difficult conditions of exile ... at once considered and colloquial ... one sees reflected the buoyancy and seriousness which are equally basic to [Kisch’s] character.” — The New Masses
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary briefly became queen consort of France, until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, but their union was unhappy. In February 1567, his residence was destroyed by an explosion, and Darnley was found murdered in the garden. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was generally believed to have orchestrated Darnley’s death, but he was acquitted of the charge in April 1567, and the following month he married Mary. Following an uprising against the couple, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. On 24 July 1567, she was forced to abdicate in favour of James VI, her one-year-old son by Darnley. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne, she fled southwards seeking the protection of her first cousin once removed, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Mary had previously claimed Elizabeth’s throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving her as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in various castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After eighteen and a half years in custody, Mary was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586 and was beheaded the following year. “The story has all the emotional savor of a crime passionnel; it is adroitly worked up to a climax of violence and calamity, and it subsides as skillfully to an end of tragic pity... With his talent for simple exposition on a large scale, his sense of drama, his ready flow of emotion, his inventiveness in detail of the moments of his character’s life, his resources of metaphor, parallel and illustration, and his rich psychological adornment of human life, Herr Zweig has no difficulty in reducing his material into its essential drama... whatever Mary’s story, and we shall never know, Zweig’s book has every right to be set down as one of the most brilliant guesses at the truth, and it is an amazing piece of virtuosity to plunge her into the blackest of guilt, and then restore her to our sympathy and pity.” — Peter Munro Jack, The New York Times “Mr. Zweig... is not a historian but... a litterateur practising biography as a branch of letters. The distinction is not derogatory... It... is the clue to the strength and weakness of the book. The litterateur borrows from the craft and exercises some of the liberty of the novelist. He is interested in character and psychology and indulges in imaginative reconstruction more freely than the historian who is forever... haunted by the words, ‘We do not know.’... [Zweig] makes a real person of Mary, a convincing portrait, and there is sympathetic understanding even when he is presenting her as the accomplice of her lover, Bothwell, in the murder of Darnley. Needless to say the style is remarkably easy and readable... [C]riticism would be unjust to the brilliant qualities of Mr. Zweig’s book, and though I hope that all he says will not be taken for gospel truth, I am certain of the pleasure he will give to his readers. There are many descriptive passages to be scored and many sentences that one would give a great deal to have written. The whole book goes with the swing of a novel. The translation is beyond praise.” — J. E. Neale, The Saturday Review
