Yesterday's World - Memoirs of a European

Author: (Austrian) Stefan Zweig, Shu Changshan, et al.
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-07-01
Features: Decades ago, Zweig wrote these memoirs in an environment that was unfavorable to him but highly characteristic of his time. Because the postal routes between countries around the world had been disrupted, or rather, hindered by censorship. Each of them lived a life isolated from the world, just as it was several hundred years ago before the invention of ships, trains, airplanes, and postal services. Therefore, everything about Zweig's past was merely based on his own memories. However, his generation had completely mastered a wonderful method: never to reminisce about what was lost. Perhaps the lack of documents and details was precisely the advantage of this book. Because, in Zweig's view, memory is not a mechanism that remembers one purely event and forgets another purely one, but rather a capacity to organize and wisely discard. Everything he had forgotten in his life was, in fact, already determined by an inner instinct to be forgotten long before. Zweig, with his timeless and fluid prose, narrates the major historical events in Europe he experienced in his life. He recreates history with the emotions of a poet and the techniques of a novelist, blending philosophy with lyricism, making historical events vivid and engaging. More importantly, he depicts the atmosphere of the era and the mindset of people. He reveals the little-known anecdotes of the world-renowned cultural figures he interacted with during that time. Precisely for this reason, The World of Yesterday is not a memoir but surpasses a memoir; it is not an autobiography but surpasses an autobiography. It will forever hold charm among readers.