Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky
Subtitle: Master Builders of the Spirit
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 291
ISBN-13: 9781351314886
Subjects: Honore de Balzac
Description: "Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world. Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures. Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book."--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Part, 1 Balzac 1799-1850  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: part, 2 Dickens 1812-1870  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 1 Plastic Years  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 2 Choice of Profession  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 3 The Human Comedy  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 4 Persons of the Comedy  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 5 The Arch-Monomaniac  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 6 Power of Auto-Suggestion  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 7 Indomitable Will  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 8 Second Sight  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 9 Rapidity of Vision  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 10 Lack of Formal Plan  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 11 The Novel as an Encyclopedia of the Soul  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: part, 3 Dostoeffsky 1821-1880  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 12 A Writer Loved More than All Others  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 13 Dickens as the Embodiment of the English Tradition  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 14 Middle-Class Comfort and Contentment  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 15 Apotheosis of the Commonplace  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 16 Amazing Powers of Visualization  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 17 Dickens as Melodramatist and Moralist  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 18 A Land of Childhood  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 19 The Humorist  -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz; title: chapter 20 The Stylist, the Comforter, and the Consoler -- Stefan Zweig Laurence Mintz.