STEPHAN ZWEIG (1881-1942) spent his youth studying
philosophy and the history of literature in Vienna and belonged to
a pan-European cultural circle that included Hugo von Hofmannsthal
and Richard Strauss. 1n 1934, under National Socialism, Zweig fled
Austria for England, where he authored several novels, short
stories, and biographies. In 1941 Zweig and his second wife
traveled to Brazil, where they both committed suicide. New York
Review Books recently republished his novel, Chess Story, in Fall
2005.
JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker and
contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books. Her latest
books is Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism.
"Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original
and powerful work...Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic
relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to
dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that
only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could
dare to attempt...Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he
seemed to be--in his novelettes and biographies--before he wrote
it: a brilliant writer." --The New York Times
"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini,
Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." --The New York Times
"Herr Zweig presents this story with considerable skill, with
compelling force...It is a good story." --The New York Times
"What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to
make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters
as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could
do this. His theme, or moral, which he does not obtrude on us in
any clumsy way, is that impulsive pity for others is a dangerous
emotion with embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous
results." --Sunday Telegraph
"Beware of Pity is an utterly unsparing dissection of the
corruptions of false pity...In stripping away the lies with which
we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the
larger lies of the age: it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that
'low, dishonest decade,' as Auden termed it." --The New York Sun
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