It was terrible, this waiting with bated breath, this waiting of a tense, motionless body. I had not the courage to withdraw the hand which had with such marvellous suddenness stilled the paroxysm of sobs, and on the other hand I had not the strength to force from my fingers the caress that Edith’s body, her burning flesh — I could tell — so urgently awaited. I let my hand lie there, as though it were not a part of me, and I felt as though all the blood in her body came surging in a warm pulsating stream to this one spot.

Now she moves his hand to her heart and begins caressing it:

There was no avidity in this fervent stroking, only serene, awe-struck bliss at being allowed at last to take fleeting possession of some part of my body.... I enjoyed the rippling of her fingers over my skin, the tingling of my nerves — I let it happen, powerless, defenceless, yet subconsciously ashamed at the thought of being loved so infinitely, while for my part feeling nothing but shy confusion, an embarrassed thrill.

The image of Hofmiller standing there awkwardly as Edith fondles his captured hand, the sheer, no-exit suffocation of the situation: the great psychologists of love (Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev) never went further than this. The scene combines their moral knowledge with a kind of neurotic, subdermal excitement reminiscent of Schnitzler, a friend of Zweig’s and another legatee of Freud. Nothing in the book is more striking than its sustained, morbid tension: the nervous laughter, the drumming fingers, the moments of happiness that convert in an instant to fury and grief, with the cutlery suddenly thrown onto the plates. Like Hofmiller, the reader is dragged down, by the neck.

A few days after the above episode, Edith will again seize Hofmiller’s hand, and slip an engagement ring onto his finger. From there, the relationship moves swiftly to its fated, disastrous conclusion. That very fatedness, not just in Beware of Pity but in his stories too, has been held against Zweig. A number of writers — for example, Stephen Spender and Salman Rushdie — have remarked on the lock-step progression of his plots and, correspondingly, on the psychological fixity of his characters. His fictional writings are in some measure case histories, textbook portraits of neurosis, Hofmiller’s indecision and Edith’s guilt-wielding being prime examples. To my mind, however, Edith’s character — her unlovability, even as she demands to be loved — is a wonderfully bold stroke, opening up whole caverns of psychological meaning. The outcasts of the world “desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy,” Hofmiller says. “They love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love.”

Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, within months of many of the great early modernists (Joyce, Stravinsky, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Picasso), but his views were not the same as theirs. Silence, exile, and cunning: these were imposed on him, but they were torture to him, and he never ceased to mourn the passing of what, in his memoir The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1942), he called the “Golden Age of Security” represented by pre — World War I Vienna. From Musil and Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, we have learned to view Franz Joseph’s Vienna as a scene of empty (however glittering) pomp in the public sphere and neuroticism in the private sphere, but Zweig’s circumstances were different from those men’s. He was the son of a millionaire industrialist — and the second son, the one not required to go into the family business. Already as a teenager he had joined a group of aesthetes whose lodestar was the brilliant young Hugo von Hofmannsthal. His thoughts were only for art, which he saw in the most ideal terms. After a conversation with Rilke, he wrote, “one was incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days.” A visit to the studio of Rodin bestowed on one “the Eternal secret of all great art, yes, of every mortal achievement, ... that ecstasis, that being-out-of-the-world of every artist.” Zweig’s politics were correspondingly vague and soaring. In keeping with the so-called “Austrian idea” — that multi-national, multi-ethnic Austro-Hungary was a symbol of human fellowship — he saw himself as a citizen not of any one country, but of Europe as a whole, “our sacred home, cradle and Parthenon of our occidental civilization.” His membership in that collective fired him with humanitarianism and optimism. In 1914, he writes in The World of Yesterday, “The world offered itself to me like a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.”

The fact that he was Jewish put no dent in his confidence. He was part of that large class of educated, assimilated, secular European Jews who were to receive such a surprise in the 1930s. As a young man, he said, he never “experienced the slightest suppression or indignity as a Jew,” and his Moravian family were “free both of the sense of inferiority and of the smooth pushing impatience of the ... Eastern Jews.” Note his willingness to disassociate himself from the poor, despised Ostjuden, who at that time were pouring into Western Europe in flight from the Russian pogroms. Herr von Kekesfalva, in Beware of Pity, started out as one of that species, and Zweig’s portrayal of Kekesfalva’s early years is what, today, many of us would call anti-Semitic writing. But Zweig, as a youth, didn’t really regard himself as a Jew, or not mostly. That was his father’s world, or his grandfather’s. By the time he wrote The World of Yesterday, in the 1940s, he had, perforce, learned to identify with the Jews and to make claims for them as an entity.