Stefan Zweig
Sovvertimento dei sensi

At a certain point you have it and then you lose it. And it's gone forever

A rather accepted theory holds that there are, in the history of a people, moments when all the energy expended, the ideas planted, the writings produced, come together to germinate, as in an artistic spring, in an era of passion, a great number of masterpieces within the span of a single generation. In other words and more generally, this theory proposes that there is a moment of ecstasy, in the existence of beings and communities, that comes suddenly and with the force of an eruption propels the protagonists of that moment towards immortality.

This happened in the second half of the 16th century in England. The world had expanded, and the national soul was stretching to match such greatness. England wanted to be great, wanted to touch the limits of good and evil, wanted to discover and conquer.

Spiritually, it needed a new language, and overnight, the speakers of this language came: the poets, wild, untamed men, not small courtly poets creating Arcadian or mythological scenes; they seized the theaters, lived among those four boards, and staged a universe of wild and superhuman passions.

So it happened in Italy, in Florence, in a phase of political, economic, financial, and social ferment, they arrived one after another: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, three men capable of eternalizing with words the climate and thoughts, feelings and passions of an era.

So between the 15th and 16th centuries in Ferrara and then and then and then...

And then in Russia when suddenly over the course of two generations...

But that is another story.

My opinion is that the Central European people of German language experienced one of these moments in the early decades of the last century and the last decades of the one before, a moment when all arts and sciences concentrated and stimulated each other in search of the total work. New ideas, a barrage of new ideas and concepts of the world and man, daughters of a cosmopolitan society, blossomed. Politics, science, and arts lived, lived as never before in Germany and Austria.

And in the world, but especially there in the center of Europe, a man was born, Sigmund Freud, who drank from the works of a limited number of geniuses and from there drew inspiration to revolutionize the idea of man's spiritual nature: finally, from his source, many artists came to drink, who fought for what they called “art itself, for the right to create artistically.”

A son of the Belle Époque

This is the historical context in which Stefan Zweig was born.

And these, in a disordered list, are the artists who lit up the era, limiting only to those of words, who were partially overshadowed by the celebrity of painters and musicians: Mann, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Rilke, Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Broch, Roth, Brecht, Junger, and finally, Zweig.

Zelig, not a small courtly poet, but cosmopolitan and at the same time a son of Vienna, the capital of the arts, anti-fascist and a wandering Jew by choice, before the war, and by fate, after the Anschluss. In the first period, he knew and studied Europe, visited America and Asia.

The First World War was a trauma even for him, but in the subsequent period, he became the world's most translated author. Among many works, he wrote in 1927 three novellas collected in a single volume: The Confusion of Feelings; characterized by a subtle psychological analysis of the protagonists, they tell the moment in their lives when they are gripped by a paroxysm of the senses and discover the being that lived within them, forgotten for a lifetime.

Subsequently, he continued to travel and understand a new Europe, transformed by nationalisms.

After '33 he took refuge in London, then in New York, and finally in Petropolis, where, dominated by depressive crises, he died by suicide in 1941.

In '39 he had finished his most read work by posterity, an autobiography with a very explicit title: The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.

The Confusion of Feelings

Is it for convenience, for lack of courage, or because of too narrow an horizon, that all (novelists) always show only the superficial edge of life, where the senses operate in the clear light of day, openly and methodically, while down below, in the basements, in the caves or cloacas of the heart, the perilous beasts of passion stir sinfully phosphorescent, in the dark uniting and tearing each other apart in every more fantastic coupling? Are they so frightened by the warm, consuming breath of demonic instincts, the exhalation of burning blood, afraid of tainting their too delicate hands on the wounds of humanity, or their eye accustomed to a gentler light does not find the way to descend, slippery steps damp with decay? And yet, for those who love to know, there is no greater pleasure than to know the occult secret, no more powerful thrill than that which accompanies danger, and no more sacred suffering than that which cannot be expressed due to shame.

A novel is a love story, the stories, however, are a night of passion. Here collected are three novellas in which the protagonists tell of that moment of ephiphany-induced lust capable of overturning psychological traits hitherto constructed, and described with mastery. The characters to whom the writer gives voice narrate themselves with liberating truthfulness, showing what for years they had kept hidden from others and sometimes from themselves.

They are a great and esteemed professor, an elderly and respectable English noblewoman, and an old Jew who after long toil became a state official. They are the victims torn apart by the dark forces that had moved for a lifetime beneath the surface. They are esteemed people, bourgeois in a bourgeois world who have intimately suffered extraordinarily, and in these novellas, they confess.

All particulars, the actions, the works, the compositions, the discourses of their lives are left in the shadow, while they try to penetrate the true essence, to identify, know in every smallest aspect, that moment which alone ignited their intimate nature.

These novellas are three gems produced by a past world and are titled: The Confusion of Feelings (which gives the title to the collection), The Sow of a Heart, and Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.