In one of his most brilliant stories, “The Confusion of Feelings” (Freud’s favorite story and also one of mine), Stefan Zweig reveals an idea that he was convinced of as a biographer: We live an infinite number of minutes, but there is always one minute, just one one that sets our intimate world on fire and accelerates its crystallization. A minute (a metaphor for a particular experience) that remains hidden in the warm interior of life for all or a short time and for which there is no algebra of mind that can measure it and quantify its radiant power. In his biographies – about Fouché, about Marie Antoinette, about Hölderlin, about Balzac – in his “stellar moments of humanity” Zweig’s concern is always the same: to acquire what he called “the authentic core of being”, the plastic cell , from which all knowledge arises. As a biographer, Zweig remained faithful to this belief, which led him to make every effort to know and reveal, in an always daring, imaginative exercise in interpretation, the secret minute of his characters, the psychological key that could lead him to understanding their personality . . And this is the reason for the international success of his biographies, the ability of this polite, generous and affable man, impatient and nervous, an impressive worker and, above all, lover of his freedom, to find his way in European culture.
His empathy enabled him to relive the tragedies and difficulties of his characters and to examine to the limits of his abilities their interstices, their psychological ruptures and the experiences that formed their character.
The Austrian’s ability to empathize with people and the passions that determine their lives is well known. This allowed him to relive the tragedies and difficulties of his characters and to probe to the limits of his abilities their interstices, their psychological ruptures, and the experiences that formed their character. As Zweig delves into the mind of Núñez de Balboa and his dramatic journey across the Isthmus of Panama in search of the Pacific; or how he uses the stroke Handel suffered at age 52 to explain the origin of his most famous musical composition; how it penetrates the conscience of a French officer who, in a night of loneliness and patriotism, composes La Marseillaise…
The Stellar Moments of Humanity, first published in 1927, are biographical pieces—“miniatures,” as he called them—of extraordinary literary magnitude. Zweig’s ambition to understand the human soul still moves us. And it is logical that his personality attracts biographers to one of his teachers. More than 20 biographies have been written about him. The last and great book is that of Luis Fernando Moreno Claros, a complete update of his life path as well as the evolution of his work, from its beginnings to his death at the age of 60, without being able to overcome the darkness. It is not clear that he held on to it for a convergence of reasons that have been well explained by the critic and biographer Moreno Claros, an excellent expert on the culture of the German language. Relying primarily on the correspondence of the character and the biography of Donald Prater (“The Life of an Impatient”, not translated into Spanish), Moreno Claros offers us a solid and dispassionate portrayal of the Austrian. The biographer has some doubts – Zweig’s possible penchant for exhibitionism, the fact that he relies on themes or interpretations that have already been discussed before, his emotional reserve in stark contrast to the passion that the lives of his characters arouse in him, and Of course, his political cowardice, of which he also becomes a victim in the end.
But it must be understood – and Moreno Claros understands it very well -: the man who tried so hard to understand everything, who made his literature a desperate defense of tolerance and humanity, was not ready to face virulence head-on to proceed Nazism. He preferred to remain as much as possible homo pro se, a man apart, like Erasmus or Montaigne. That is, someone who could live protected in his ideas, his books and his weaknesses. The voluntary death that brings his life to a final point forces us to believe that his world was actually different and that he had nothing to lose by dying because everything was already lost.
Luis Fernando Moreno Claros
Harp, 2023
519 pages. 24.90 euros
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