The Stefan Zweig Collection - Volume 4: A New Translation

Stefan Zweig wrote at a moment when old certainties were collapsing and new anxieties were crowding in. Born into the liberal, cosmopolitan Vienna of the late Habsburg Empire, he witnessed its sudden dissolution in 1918, the poverty and political violence of the First Republic, and finally the rise of Nazism that drove him into exile. Throughout those upheavals he returned, again and again, to a private battlefield: the fleeting instant when a hidden desire or long-suppressed fear bursts into the open and overturns a life. The three works gathered here-Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, Burning Secret, and The Wonders of Life-trace that volatile crossing point with a clarity and compassion that remain startlingly modern. Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927) is perhaps Zweig's most accomplished study of sudden passion. On the French Riviera, an English widow plunges into reckless pursuit of a young gambler she has known for only a few hours. By compressing the story into a single revolution of the clock, Zweig magnifies every heartbeat and hesitation, revealing both the terror and the exhilaration of surrendering to an impulse that defies age, class, and propriety. The novella set a pattern that would echo through his later fiction: an apparently respectable life laid bare by one uncontrollable desire, narrated with almost clinical attention to gesture and inner monologue. Burning Secret began as an early tale in 1911 and was revised two decades later, after the First World War had sharpened the author's understanding of innocence and betrayal. A cynical baron, bored at an Alpine spa, befriends a lonely twelve-year-old boy solely to reach the boy's mother. The seduction is narrated from the child's half-comprehending viewpoint-a masterstroke that turns a conventional triangle into a psychological thriller. As the boy pieces together the "secret" he has accidentally facilitated, Zweig exposes the fissures between adult desire and childhood trust, and the corrosive effect of duplicity on both. The Wonders of Life (1903) represents yet another facet of Zweig's obsession with the moment of inner upheaval. First published as part of the early "Erika Ewald" cycle, this lyrical meditation follows a shy young pianist overwhelmed by an almost mystical surge of creative and erotic energy while listening to Beethoven in a concert hall. Unlike the worldly novellas that precede it in this volume, The Wonders of Life is rooted in the language of music and transcendence; its "reckless passion" is aesthetic as well as physical. Yet the consequences are no less destabilising: the protagonist steps outside ordinary existence for an hour and can never comfortably return. Taken together, these three texts map the arc of passion from first tremor to irreversible aftermath. They also trace an arc through Zweig's career: from the youthful exaltation of The Wonders of Life, through the disillusioned insight of Burning Secret, to the poised craftsmanship of Twenty-Four Hours. Read side by side, they reveal how consistently he honed his trademark blend of narrative speed, psychological penetration, and humane curiosity. More than eighty years after Zweig's death, his characters still speak to our own private crises-the reckless risks we weigh, the secrets we guard or betray, the split-second decisions that reroute a life. These pages invite us to stand at that crossroads with them, to feel the tremor of choice, and to recognise, in their fragile grandeur, the measure of our own.