Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky
Title | Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky PDF eBook |
Author | Stefan Zweig |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 293 |
Release | 2017-09-29 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1351314874 |
Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world. Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures. Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book.
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism
Title | Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism PDF eBook |
Author | Donald Fanger |
Publisher | Northwestern University Press |
Pages | 332 |
Release | 1998 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780810115934 |
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.
Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky
Title | Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky PDF eBook |
Author | Stefan Zweig |
Publisher | Plunkett Lake Press |
Pages | 221 |
Release | 2019-08-16 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN |
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”
The Realists
Title | The Realists PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Percy Snow |
Publisher | |
Pages | 264 |
Release | 1978 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN |
Dostoevsky by Zweig
Title | Dostoevsky by Zweig PDF eBook |
Author | Stefan Zweig |
Publisher | Plunkett Lake Press |
Pages | 115 |
Release | 2019-08-16 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN |
This is the third essay of Stefan Zweig’s Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, written in the early 20th century. Part biography, part literary criticism, part cultural history, the essay offers a window onto how a Central European regarded the Russian master, who died in 1881, the year Zweig was born. Dostoevsky’s genius, in Zweig’s view, owed a debt to his illness, as Tolstoy’s did to his radiant health. Illness “enabled Dostoevsky to soar upward into a sphere of such concentrated feeling as is rarely experienced by normal men; it permitted him to penetrate into the underworld of the emotions, into the submerged regions of the psyche.” This essay is one of the best examples of Zweig’s psychologically-informed literary criticism.
Adepts in Self-portraiture
Title | Adepts in Self-portraiture PDF eBook |
Author | Stefan Zweig |
Publisher | |
Pages | 390 |
Release | 1928 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky
Title | Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky PDF eBook |
Author | Stefan Zweig |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 296 |
Release | 2017-09-29 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1351314866 |
Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world. Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures. Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book.