Journey Into The Past E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Stefan's Zweig's posthumously-published Journey into the Past (Widerstand der Wirklichkeit) is a beautiful meditation on the effect of time on passion-one of the most intense and compelling works from a master of the novella form. Published by Pushkin Press with a cover designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats as part of a new range of Stefan Zweig paperbacks. Kept away for nine years by the First World War Ludwig has finally returned home, reunited at last with the woman he had so passionately loved, and who had promised to wait for him. Previously divided by wealth and class, both are now married and much changed by their experiences. Confronted with an uncertain future, and still haunted by the past, they discover whether their love has survived hardships, betrayals, and the lapse of time. Zweig's long-lost final novella- recently discovered in manuscript form-is a poignant examination of the angst of nostalgia and the fragility of love.. 'Journey into the Past is vintage Stefan Zweig lucid, tender, powerful and compelling.' — Chris Schuler, Independent 'Zweig belongs with three very different masters who each perfected the challenging art of the short story and the novella: Maupassant, Turgenev and Chekhov.' — Paul Bailey Translated from the German by Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past is published by Pushkin Press. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

Translated from the German and with an Afterword by Anthea Bell

Foreword by Paul Bailey

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Table of Contents

Title PageThe Resurrected MasterJourney into the PastTranslator’s AfterwordOther Stefan Zweig titles published by Pushkin PressCopyright

THE RESURRECTED MASTER

The Subtle Fiction of Stefan Zweig

IT IS ONLY IN RECENT YEARS that Stefan Zweig has been recognised and lauded by English-speaking readers as an incomparable storyteller. His reputation in Britain during the 1920s and 30s was based almost entirely on his short and informative biographies of Marie Antoinette, Casanova, Tolstoy and—among the then living—Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, both of whom he had befriended. Rolland, the author of the turgid but worthy novel Jean-Christophe, inspired by the life of Beethoven, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1916. Rolland, a pacifist and musicologist, kept his imaginative distance from such unsavoury human foibles as envy and spite and downright wickedness—qualities that are explored and dramatized in Thomas Mann’s altogether superior fictional study of a great composer, Doctor Faustus. The kindly, decent Romain Rolland is virtually forgotten today, but Zweig, his eulogistic biographer, lives on in the comparatively modest forms of the novella and the short story.

He was capable of writing at greater length, as his most substantial and famous novel, Beware of Pity (1939) and the recently translated and published The Post Office Girl testify. Yet his heart was in the conte—the tale told by word of mouth, or by letter, that can be read at a single sitting. Each of his varied narrators has something urgent to impart—a long-buried secret, the confession of a misdeed, or the revelation of the truth behind a circumstance others had accepted at face value. They are people with a pressing need to make sense of the inexplicable. They question why their lives have gone astray and why they allowed their feelings to override convention and common sense. They are, by and large, victims and survivors of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it would be easy to dismiss them as decadent. Zweig puts decadence in perspective, neither revelling in its attractiveness nor castigating its more squalid aspects. It is to his aesthetic purpose to sound the human note, and to do so in such a disarming manner as to shame the reader who has already made facile judgements. His men and women are complicated, and he would not have it otherwise. He is a celebrator of confusion—the word he employs as the title for a brief masterpiece that bears comparison with Mann’s Death in Venice—and it is in a confused state that they seek to explicate their often banal misfortunes.

Zweig’s narrative method is simple. Someone has a desperate story to tell, and Zweig contrives a way—a chance encounter at a gambling salon at Monte Carlo, a manuscript left among a dead man’s belongings—for him or her to tell it. The beauty lies in the act of telling, of exquisite self-exposure, the thrill of sending an illicit message into the unknown. Zweig’s contrivances might be deemed obvious, were they not so powerfully effective. Confusion, the subtitle of which is The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D, is a perfect example of his subtle art. These are ‘private papers’ with a very big difference, for they are scarcely concerned with R von D’s life at all. The Privy Councillor has been showered with academic and civic honours, which he mentions casually, almost disdainfully. The true subject of his memoir is a professor of English language and literature in a university in a small town in central Germany. The young Roland, whose name is not revealed until the end of the narrative, enrols as a student in the professor’s class. The hitherto lazy and undisciplined youth finds himself enthralled and enchanted by the teacher, whose love and understanding of Shakespeare is fuelled by a deep knowledge of the Elizabethan age—its poetry, its drama, its politics. The professor offers him accommodation in the spare room at the top of the house he shares with his bitter and frustrated wife. It becomes clear, as the delicate and complex story develops, that the professor’s passionate and inspirational manner in the lecture hall is a sublimation, as Freud would have noted, for his unsatisfied sexual feelings. Whenever Roland’s hero disappears to Berlin, it is with a specific purpose in mind. He goes to notorious bars frequented by male prostitutes and, when he has consumed enough alcohol to give him courage, he approaches and propositions the one he finds most physically attractive. What follows in the morning is best summed up in Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIX:

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight …

The professor returns to the university after these adventures full of shame and self-loathing, feelings common to male homosexuals in the days when society regarded them as lepers. Zweig recounts in his wonderful memoir The World of Yesterday, which was published posthumously, that he was horrified at the sight of the boys, many of them wearing make-up and feminine accessories, lined up along the Kurfürstendamm plying their trade. (A decade later, these boys and their successors would be regarded with something close to affection by W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Francis Bacon.) Zweig’s ‘revulsion’ is reflected in the character of the professor, but with a novelist’s disinterested compassion. Confusion comes to a close with a heartfelt and beautifully resonant coda, in which the dead and forgotten professor is afforded a literary honour by his adoring pupil, a married man with children, more precious than the specious titles bestowed on the privy councillor. “I have never loved anyone more”, he writes of the man with whom he once shared a single kiss.