Word: zweig
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Stefan Zweig has accomplished in his biography of his friend, Romain Rolland, what Romain Holland himself had in mind when he wrote his "heroic biographies" of "Beethoven", "Michelangelo", and "Tolstoi". Rolland, in these books, wanted to write the lives of the heroes of history as he knew them. "True greatness was for him to be found only in solitude, in the struggle waged by the individual against the unseen." He aimed at bringing solace to others by showing, in the lives of these men, that their titanic and lonely struggles brought them at last to the places they so well...
...Zweig traces the sad and triumphant story of Rolland from his early visit to Rome when he fell under the inspiring influence of Malwida von Meysenbug; when Tolstoi so kindly answered the young man's letter of doubt raised by his booklet What's to be Done?, through the lonely years of his unsuccessful "tragedies of fate", including "Danton" and "St. Louis", through the year of the "heroic biographies", which gained for Rolland an interested but small following, to his final and definite victory with his ten volume novel "Jean Christophe" (1902-1912), and the disappointments...