Three Masters

Author: (Austrian) Stefan Zweig
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: In The Three Masters, Zweig regarded Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky as geniuses of narrative literature and encyclopedic writers. When discussing them, he did not speak in general terms or cover everything comprehensively, but instead focused tightly on their essential qualities—the kind of thing that, if you grasp it, everything else falls into place. These were the guiding principles in their lives and creative works. In Balzac, Zweig portrayed Balzac, who lived in the late era of Napoleon, as a Napoleon who conquered the world with his pen, determined to complete the work that Napoleon had failed to achieve with his sword. It was this literary ambition that became the driving force behind his creation, the passion of his life, a passion that dominated him until the very end of his days. He was relentless, constantly pursuing this goal, and in his writing, he forgot about reality, immersing himself in the world he had constructed. To this end, he constantly stimulated his nerves with coffee, working as many as eighteen hours a day. His writing was not labor but a dream and an obsession; he became what Zweig called in another of his long biographies, Balzac, a "writing machine." He was utterly devoted to his craft, using his pen to build an empire: La Comédie Humaine, composed of over ninety works, including Scenes from Private Life, Scenes from Provincial Life, Scenes from Parisian Life, Scenes from Political Life, Philosophical Studies, and Analytical Studies. Balzac used this monumental work to construct an era, making it an encyclopedia of the nineteenth century, a vast repository of human literature.
In The Three Masters, Dostoevsky is the longest chapter and one that Zweig wrote with great passion. On February 8, 1916, in a letter to Hermann Hesse, he referred to this book as embodying three years of his labor and heart. Each of these three novelists had their own domain. Balzac was the world of society, Dickens the world of the family, and Dostoevsky the world of all things. Comparing these domains reveals their differences, but these differences cannot be reinterpreted through value judgments or emphasized through personal preferences to highlight a particular artist's national characteristics. Every great creator is a unity, setting their own scale to define their boundaries and weight: within a work, there is only one density, not the absolute weight of a just scale. These three essays are based on an understanding of the works they discuss: they are not introductions but rather elevations, distillations, and refinements. Because of their high level of condensation, they can only represent what Zweig personally considered the most important—this necessary deficiency made him particularly regretful in the chapter on Dostoevsky. His significance, like Goethe's, was so vast that no form could encompass it.