Product Description

Casanova, the Venetian who lived most of his life in exile from the city, created his own myth which in turn is a reflection of the city itself. This biographical essay, originally written in 1928, commemorates the bicentenary of Casanova's death on 4th June 1798.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #870465 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-31
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of 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 enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

Customer Reviews

An excellent example of a 'psychological portrait'.
Only now are the works of some of the artists, musicians and writers suppressed by the Nazi regime beginning to be known outside an inner circle of cognoscenti. Artists might be persecuted for a variety of reasons: because their work encompassed expressionism in art, or atonality in music; or simply because they were Jewish, regardless of their chosen medium or style. One such artist, who, despite his considerable reknown as a biographer, short-story writer and novelist, was obliged to leave his native Austria during the 1930s, was Stefan Zweig. Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881. He became one of that remarkable group of artists who were active in that city in the early decades of the twentieth century. He emigrated to the UK in 1934 and became a British citizen, before moving on to Brazil in 1941. The following year he and his wife committed suicide there. Given his adopted nationality, it is wholly appropriate that Zweig's short stories, in particular, are now appearing in English translations: indeed, it is scandalous that they have not been more widely available before now. 'Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture' makes a superb introduction to Zweig's oeuvre for those unfamiliar with it, and a welcome addition to it for those who are. First published in the 1920s, it is an example of a 'psychological portrait' in words, comparable to those which Zweig's Viennese contemporary Oskar Kokoschka executed in paint. It is a long way from the kind of biography with which most of us are familiar: there is little connected chronological information, and there are few dates. It takes as its starting-point Casanova's own multi-volume autobiography, published posthumously in 1822 (Casanova died in 1798). Zweig notes an 'Insoluble paradox': that 'Imaginative writers rarely have a biography, and men who have biographies are only in exceptional circumstances able to write them.... Casanova is a splendid, almost unique exception' (p. 17). In his analysis, Zweig magnificently juxtaposes his sense of incredulity at the enormities of this wanton, craven, dishonest and yet, one can only assume, immensely likeable (or, at least, hugely plausible) reprobate with his shrewd observations of the spiritual void at the centre of this life lived on an exclusively material plane. In submitting himself so completely to his physical desires and being governed exclusively by them, Casanova realises human existence at its most basic level as fully as one can imagine it being realised, and as such can only command our admiration. However - and here's the rub - in actualising the physical animal that a human being is, Casanova completely failed to actualise all those other aspects of humanity to which we may aspire. All those other levels of existence, of feeling, of spirituality, were denied to him. Zweig simply notes this fact without drawing any conclusions from it: he is far too shrewd to be a simple moraliser. But his observations make for a 'psychological portrait' that is quite remarkable in its depth and profundity. Zweig was, of course, highly familiar with the theories of his compatriot Sigmund Freud: indeed, he gave the address at the funeral of his fellow-exile in London in 1939. To this familiarity, in part, can be attributed the perspicacity of Zweig's remarkable biographical essay concerning the life of Casanova. But greater still is the sheer humanity of this writer, whose empathy with the human condition is such as to permit his striking insights into it. 'Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture' may strike the casual observer as simply a book on an esoteric subject by a little-known writer. In its insights into what it means to be human it is far, far more. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

A jewel
Zweig's short biography of Casanova is, like all of Zweig's work, beautifully written. But the jewel is the essay on Memory in the "Afterword." This is a masterpiece of psychological understanding. Any book that stimulates one to read a further 12 volumes has to be highly recommended!