Encounters and Destinies

'The European voice... sparkling with poetic brilliance' - TLS

'Zweig's accumulated historical and cultural studies [are] almost too impressive to take in' - Clive James

Stefan Zweig was a born eulogist. In this collection of powerful elegies, homages and personal memories, Zweig forms a richly interconnected portrait of key creative figures in the European cultural diaspora up to 1939. Many of those mourned or celebrated here cast a long spiritual shadow over Zweig's own writing life: Verhaeren, Rolland, Nietzsche, Roth, Mahler, Rilke and Freud.

Zweig's farewells, souvenirs and declarations of gratitude demonstrate his ardent pan-Europeanism and rich friendships across borders. Elegant and haunting, these tributes are a monument to his reverence for the arts and his belief in the sacredness of individualism.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Will Stone.

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into 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 was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Will Stone (b. 1966) is a poet, essayist and literary translator from French and German. Among many other volumes of poetry and prose, he has translated several wors by Stena Zweig publish bye Pushkin Press, including Montaigne, Nietzsche, Messages from a Lost World and Journeys.