Word: zweig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA-Arnold Zweig-Viking...
Volpone. When the Theatre Guild wanted to play Ben Jonson's sardonic comedy, they chose to retranslate the German version recently effected by Stefan Zweig. Their choice was wise. As rewritten by an up-to-date European, Author Jonson's somewhat mechanical morality becomes a gleeful and raucous farce, lacking the solemnity of a classic and imbued instead with precisely the caustic and colloquial violence which it had for its original audiences...
CONFLICTS?Stefan Zweig?Viking Press ($2.50). Stefan Zweig, talented globe-trotter and literary dilettante, was shaken by the War out of gay indolence at Vienna into mapping out two series of ambitious literary projects which he has since pursued with a vigor and skill that has brought him high rank, before his 50th year, among the authors of all Europe. One series is biography?spiritual portraits (of the type done by Gamaliel Bradford in the U. S.) of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy (so far). The second series, to which the three stories in this volume belong, consists of novelettes...
...tightly and smoothly does Dr. Zweig draw the membrane of transparent prose over the tissue of his situations that the science-conscious reader cannot help regarding these cases as studies sooner than stories. Yet excellent stories they remain, of a forcible, clinical reality. Their few faults are where the scientist betrays the craftsman in over-insistence upon data. Elsewhere the craftsman dramatizes the data unforgettably, especially in a long passage where the emotions of a dozen people at a roulette table are followed, as in cinema, by watching the restless activity of their hands...
...Stephan Zweig has written a fascinating and inspiring biography, lacking the impersonal and critical faculty that would make it great. He is too near his subject to see him in perspective, too carried away by his personality to judge him as anything but a hero of an "heroic biography". The translation of Eden and Cedar Paul is often annoying with its endless inverted sentences, its florid and over elaborate style, its frequent tendency to melodramatize prose, which must have been stately and flowing in the original. But Roman Rolland is a book to be read, and reread as an engrossing...