Condor, with his supposedly good kind of pity, married a blind woman to console her for his failure to cure her. Late in the novel, we meet her: she hangs on Condor, presses on him her anxiety and gloom. Zweig, like many bold writers, posed himself problems that he could not always solve. In such cases, one has to ask oneself what feels true, what feels false, on the page. In Beware of Pity, what feels true are the scenes in which we are shown the futility of pity. This is a horrible lesson; it is also what makes the book radical and modern.

But however modern in his subject matter, Zweig was not what we call a modernist. Though he flourished in the Twenties and Thirties, his memoirs make no mention of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Picasso, Stravinsky. He knew Joyce, but he doesn’t seem to have read Ulysses. He went to a Schönberg première, but he doesn’t say he liked it. The frontier of modern art, in his mind, appears to have been Rilke and Richard Strauss. This fact — that in a period of formal experimentation, he was not an experimentalist — is part of the reason that he, together with other stylistically traditional moderns (Joseph Roth, for example), has been valued by later generations at less than his true worth. At the same time, Zweig had real faults as a writer. I have mentioned the subservience of plot and character to idea. He was also fond of clanking narrative devices: the tale told by the stranger in the night; the lightning and thunder as the plot reaches its turning point. One must also note the plump, upholstered quality of some of his writing. This is something one is sorry to hold against him. He had a magnificently cultivated mind, strong emotions, a pronounced idealism, and a passionate devotion to nineteenth-century art. Put those things together, and it is no surprise that he was likely, in the words of one of his editors, to sing an “aria” at the end of a chapter, or even a paragraph. But these blasts of hot air, rife in The World of Yesterday, are absent from Beware of Pity. As for the predictability of plot and character, and the shopworn narrative conventions, they are present, but they count for little next to the subtlety and intensity of the psychological situation.

In 1941 Zweig and Lotte emigrated to Brazil, where they (and Zweig’s income) would be safe from harm. Zweig also thought that in multiethnic Brazil he would find a happy, supranational society like that of the Austro-Hungary of his imagination. At first he seemed to adjust fairly well. He and Lotte settled in Petropolis, in the mountains outside Rio. He started a biography of Montaigne. He acquired a little dog, who, he wrote to Friderike, had won second prize in a beauty contest. He and the dog took walks every day, and he gazed at the fabulous vistas. But they were not his vistas; those were in Europe, being overrun by killers. On the night of February 23, 1942, he wrote a note of thanks to the people of Brazil and a salute to his friends: “May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.” Then he and Lotte took an overdose of barbiturates. The next morning, they were found dead, in their bed, holding hands.

— JOAN ACOCELLA

BEWARE OF PITY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A short explanation may perhaps be necessary for the English reader. The Austro-Hungarian Army constituted a uniform, homogeneous body in an Empire composed of a very large number of nations and races.