Word: zweig
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Dates: during 1921-1921
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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...
...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...