Synopses & Reviews
In Stefan Zweig’s
Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor’s brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor’s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor’s frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man’s apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out. . .
Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig’s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.
Synopsis
Stefan Zweig was particularly drawn to the novella, and
Confusion, a rigorous and yet transporting dramatization of the conflict between the heart and the mind, is among his supreme achievements in the form.
A young man who is rapidly going to the dogs in Berlin is packed off by his father to a university in a sleepy provincial town. There a brilliant lecture awakens in him a wild passion for learning—as well as a peculiarly intense fascination with the graying professor who gave the talk. The student grows close to the professor, becoming a regular visitor to the apartment he shares with his much younger wife. He takes it upon himself to urge his teacher to finish the great work of scholarship that he has been laboring at for years and even offers to help him in any way he can. The professor welcomes the young man’s attentions, at least on some days. On others, he rages without apparent reason or turns away from his disciple with cold scorn. The young man is baffled, wounded. He cannot understand.
But the wife understands. She understands perfectly. And one way or another she will help him to understand too.
About the Author
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels
The Post-Office Girl and
Beware of Pity as well as the novellas
Chess Story and
Journey Into the Past.
Anthea Bell is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Zweig’s Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
George Prochnik is the author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. He has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Cabinet, among other publications.