Book Review on The World of Yesterday :: essays research papers fc

The Death of a Soul, The Glance of History And meet the time as it seeks us. Cymberline Before the preface, I saw the sentence adopted from Shakespeare ¡Ã‚ ¯s Cymberline . All of the sudden, a sense of seriousness and heaviness mounted up in my heart. I felt the author ¡Ã‚ ¯s tone of despair and disillusionment.  ¡Ã‚ °at most, one generation had gone though a revolution, another experienced a putsch, the third a war, the fourth a famine, the fifth national bankruptcy ¡Ã‚ ­But we, who are sixty today and who, de jure, still have a space of time before us, what have we not seen, not suffered, not lived though? ¡Ã‚ ± Such struggling words can only be composed by a writer in unbearable agonies. Actually, the author was forced to witness the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. What an embarrassing situation it was to an intellectual with great concern for the humanity and morality. Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in a middle class family in Austria and died at his own hands in 1942 at the age of 60, crossing two centuries, witnessing two contemporary wars. He was well-known as a novelist, a playwright, a biographer a manuscript collector and a pacifist. In 1934, he was exiled to Britain and then to Brazil where he lived his rest of life with his wife. The World of Yesterday is his autobiography written between 1939 and 1940. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. As for his own autography, he was to  ¡Ã‚ °give some reflection of his life before it sinks into the darkness. ¡Ã‚ ±(P.9) It is not so much an autobiography as a  ¡Ã‚ °biography ¡Ã‚ ± of his time. It is a vivid, moving and nostalgic portrayal of Europe before wars; it is a story about intellectual brotherhood which tried to prevent national madness that destroyed the Europe and the world, twice. In the book, we picture the dramatic progress of material wealth and despairing collapse of morality. It also provides a source for us to know other great figures like Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Tolstoy and Freud who constituted the most glorious and attractive scenery at that time, making the sky not so sad. If we intend to figure out one of the best times in history, there is no doubt that the time before the World War I ¡Ã‚ ªZweig ¡Ã‚ ¯s childhood and youth hood ¡Ã‚ ªis definitely one.