Stefan Zweig's diaries cover nearly thirty years of the writer's life, and due to their spontaneity, they are an irreplaceable document, as well as a great counterpoint to his autobiography, *The World of Yesterday*. The pages of this volume, often dictated by the urgency of the moment but as lucid as his most elaborate texts, reveal the writer's daily life in Vienna, Paris, Zurich, and Bern—where he cultivated the friendship of other intellectuals, such as Émile Verhaeren, Romain Rolland, and Rainer Maria Rilke—or the fascination that two American cities, New York and Rio de Janeiro, held in him. But they also reveal the intimate horror that the Great War represented for Zweig and, two decades later, the totalitarian and anti-Semitic drift of the continent and the rise of Nazism, which drove him desperately to seek refuge from the disheartening collapse of Europe. These diaries once ...read more
