“Nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry,” he says, and he names the names. With typical modesty, he does not include himself, but by the age of nineteen he had published his first book of poems and had begun writing feuilletons for the highly regarded Neue Freie Presse, under the editorship of Theodor Herzl.

Fired by his devotion to art, he was nevertheless unconfident of his ability to contribute to that enterprise, and so he spent many of his early years in service to other artists, as translator or biographer. During his lifetime he was as much valued for his biographical books and essays — on Verlaine, Verhaeren, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Romain Rolland, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Erasmus, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, and Magellan, among others — as for anything else that he wrote, though his collections of novellas were also hugely popular, with their portrayals of sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois manners. In addition, he wrote plays, travel books, and an opera libretto. He was a literary man of all trades, not so much an author as a “voice” — to some, the voice of Europe.

Zweig often received letters from female fans, and one such correspondence — with Friderike von Winternitz, a young writer — led to his first marriage. Friderike left her husband for Zweig, and they were together for more than twenty years, his most productive years, from the 1910s to the 1930s. Then, in 1933, Friderike hired a new secretary for Zweig: Charlotte Altmann, a shy, self-effacing German-Jewish woman, twenty-seven years his junior, whose family had just been run out of Germany. Lotte immediately fell in love with him. What he felt in return is not clear to his biographers, but at this time his mood was very bleak. His youthful confidence had been irreparably wounded by World War I, and as the Nazis began dragging Europe into a second war, his former optimism converted to an equally absolute pessimism. By 1933 the Hitler Youth were burning his books; in 1935 Richard Strauss’s opera The Silent Woman was canceled after two performances because Zweig had written the libretto.

But his problem went beyond politics. He had come to hate the bustle and noise of his Salzburg household. He was a manically devoted worker. Friderike, though she tried to insulate him, had two daughters from her previous marriage, and she enjoyed visitors. In her 1946 biography of Zweig she blames his defection on “the climacteric.” Maybe so, but it seems that he just wanted out, of everything except silence and work, two things that Lotte provided. After several years of vacillation — for he was, by nature, as indecisive as Hofmiller — Zweig in 1938 persuaded Friderike to give him a divorce, assuring her that he had no intention of remarrying and needed only to regain his “student’s freedom.” The following year, he married Lotte.

By then he had escaped to London, and it was during this terrible period, the late Thirties, that he wrote Beware of Pity. Some people have seen Lotte — vulnerable not just politically but also physically (she had severe asthma), and utterly dependent on Zweig — as a model for Edith, but Zweig’s guilt over discarding Friderike must have had some part in the portrait. Then there was Zweig’s mother, a willful and self-absorbed woman with whom, Friderike reports, he lived in open conflict throughout his childhood — a situation that left “indelible scars.” This does not exhaust the list of probable sources. Freud’s case histories unquestionably contributed to Beware of Pity. His patients often suffered paralyses, and tended to fall in love with their doctor. (The words “hysterical” and “subconscious” recur in the novel.) Finally, it does not need restating that this pessimistic book was written during the buildup to World War II. During the Thirties and Forties, Zweig was criticized by many of his colleagues for making no public denunciation of Nazism. His famous name would have added heft to the anti-fascist cause. But for all his humanitarianism, Zweig had a horror of politics. (He didn’t vote; he allowed no radio in the house; he read the newspapers only at night, in the café, lest they disturb his day’s work.) His response to Europe’s peril was indirect, symbolic: Beware of Pity, among other writings.

Zweig tried to mitigate the bleakness of the novel’s message. In an epigraph to the book, he writes that there are two kinds of pity:

One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness ... ; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

This, as we discover later, is a quotation from Edith’s physician, Dr. Condor, and Zweig may have intended it as a tribute to Freud’s treatment of his patients. Hofmiller’s is the wrong kind of pity; Dr. Condor’s — and Dr. Freud’s — is the right kind. One wonders whether Zweig actually believed this.