Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Overview

Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed far from home, is invited to a lavish party at the mansion of a rich Hungarian landowner, Lajos. In a world of luxurious living far removed from the bare life at the barracks, Anton meets Edith, the daughter of the host, and spontaneously asks her for a dance. When he realizes a sickness has left her crippled for life, deep compassion for her overtakes him, leading Edith to fall in love with him. Soon Anton is drawn into a vortex of events and emotions quite unforeseen, as pity and guilt inexorably implicate him in a well-meaning intention that tragically goes wrong

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788129151230
Publisher:	Rupa Publication
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and biographer. Born into an Austrian--Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna's cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and biographies. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world: extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe - he remains so in continental Europe - however, he was largely ignored by the British public. Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Burning Secret, The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman; novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion, and the post-humously published The Post Office Girl); and his vivid psychological biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled from Salzburg to London, then to New York, and finally to Brazil. Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before Zweig and his second wife were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

Editorial Reviews

"Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original and powerful work...Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could dare to attempt...Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he seemed to be—in his novelettes and biographies—before he wrote it: a brilliant writer." —The New York Times

"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." —The New York Times

"Herr Zweig presents this story with considerable skill, with compelling force...It is a good story." —The New York Times

"What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this. His theme, or moral, which he does not obtrude on us in any clumsy way, is that impulsive pity for others is a dangerous emotion with embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous results." —Sunday Telegraph

"Beware of Pity is an utterly unsparing dissection of the corruptions of false pity...In stripping away the lies with which we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the larger lies of the age: it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that 'low, dishonest decade,' as Auden termed it." —The New York Sun

From the Publisher