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    Confusion
    Confusion
    Confusion
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    Confusion

    By Stefan Zweig and Anthea Bell

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    About this ebook

    In the autumn of his days, a distinguished privy councillor contemplates his past and looks back at the key moments of his life. A reluctant and indolent student, he recalls a chance meeting with a reclusive professor and his frustrated wife, with whom he ends up sharing lodgings. His thirst for knowledge leads him to form an ambiguous and close relationship with the professor. But the professor harbours a secret which changes and scars both men for ever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2002
    ISBN9781906548810
    Confusion
    Author

    Stefan Zweig

    Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity,and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

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    Reviews for Confusion

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      This novella explores the relationship between a young university student and his professor. The student is completely enamored of this professor's ideas and life and the professor quickly adopts him in return. He finds a flat in the same boarding house and starts spending every day with the Professor and his young wife. This novella captures a brief time period, probably only one semester, and is intense and dramatic.

      I enjoyed this, but sometimes when I read a novel of this length I leave unsatisfied. I feel like there was more that could have been explored here. There's no denying, though, that Zweig's writing is excellent.
    • 3/5
      Not Zweig's best, it feels a tad lightweight in parts (perhaps things are too obvious?). As always with the author, it's wonderfully written, though I think his best work was completed in his short stories.
    • 5/5
      In this, a seemingly directionless young student is suddenly inspired by a passionate professor of Shakespeare. The relationships between the student, the professor and his young wife are complicated and they (and the reader) go through a rollercoaster of emotions. It's hard to write a review of this without a lot of spoilers .. so I'll just say that this is a great study of student/mentor, psychological challenges, cultural taboos and expectations.
    • 4/5
      POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT - (though I think you'd have to be pretty dense not to realize what's going on after the first forty pages)

      "The love that dare not speak its name" in Wilhelmine Germany. Zweig's novella from 1926 is dated, but interestingly so. A tale of pedagogy and repression - and in the NYRB edition, beautifully translated by Anthea Bell.
    • 5/5
      I picked up the novella known to me as [La confusion des sentiments] yesterday on audio, which I'd gotten from the library in the French translation read by an excellent narrator, Daniel Mesguich, a French-Algerian actor and director in theater and opera. I ended up doing lots of things around the house I'd put off for weeks and months just so I could listen to the whole thing in one 'sitting' so to speak. There's something about Zweig's writing I find deeply satisfying. He seems to go to the centre of human feeling and look at what moves us in a manner both unflinching, and also very gentle, perhaps because of all the attention to the finer movements of the heart he delves on. I had started this audiobook some months back and couldn't concentrate and so decided to put it off to a time when I felt more receptive to it, and I'm glad I did. It's a story told in the first person by a beautiful and naive young man of nineteen who initially has little or no interest in literature and studying, who on his first day at a new university meets a professor whose passionate delivery about Shakespeare and the Elizabethans is so mesmerizing that he becomes instantly enamoured of both the subject and the professor, both of which he decides to dedicate himself to heart and soul. Pure poetry and complex and satisfying character studies.
    • 5/5
      This is another fantastic Zweig. A respected, successful professor looks back on the relationship that both made him and scarred him. He recalls his youth, first as a dissipated young man, then as a dedicated student who revered his literature professor, a moody but passionate man with a disapproving, changeable wife. The book is a highly addictive read and as usual, Zweig has excellent, intense depictions of varying psychological states. The central secret will probably be easy for modern readers to guess but it is still a powerful story.

      The narrator, Roland, first relates his hedonistic days as a student at a large university in Berlin. After being discovered by his father, he shamefacedly transfers to a smaller school in a provincial town. Roland was never a very dedicated student. However, when he walks in on his English professor giving a fiery, passionate lecture, he is swept away and delves into the material, transforming into a model student. The professor comes to act as a mentor to him and Roland spends more and more time at his professor’s apartment. He is also introduced to the professor’s wife, a cool and self-effacing woman. Strangely, when Roland meets her in public, she is cheerful and gregarious, seemingly a different person. When Roland decides to help his professor complete his unfinished magnum opus, the fragile relations between the three of them come crashing down.

      The literal translation of the original title is something like “Emotional Maelstrom” and this could fit almost any of Zwieg’s novels. Zweig does an amazingly good job of conveying the intensity of the characters’ feelings even when he does some telling instead of showing. However, the English title, Confusion, is also apt – the narrator is frequently uncertain about the thoughts and intentions of the professor and his wife. All the characters have two versions of their selves that are seen throughout the book and there are a number of scenes that have someone “catching” another character in a different mode. Roland’s father walks in on him with a girl, a moment of shame and discovery as well as the start of the actual plot. The narrator switches between thoughtless hedonist and dedicated student but remembering people observing him as the former is a source of embarrassment. The professor also has a double life. Roland catches him as an enthusiastic molder of minds and is inspired. Later, though, he reverts back to an old and tired man going through the motions of teaching. As they get closer, the professor is alternately a kind mentor or cold and insulting. His wife is caught in public by Roland in another confusion scene. This duality clearly leads up to the denouement and there is a related motif of observation and voyeurism. The frequent idea of someone watching becomes oppressive and the climactic scene takes place in the dark. In addition, the whole story is Roland’s memory of the past and it becomes obvious that he has preserved the confusing doubling of his youth – a point made clear in the last sentences.
    • 5/5
      A longer and more polished review to follow, but suffice to say that this novella was a treat from start to finish. There are parallels to my own life here, so much so that it may take me a while to write something of any note about this fine book. I am very happy to have added Stefan Zweig to my growing list of writers whom I adore and am so grateful for. This book may not be for everyone, as it deals mostly with what it means to love, and the manners in which love can happen and exist for a person who not only feels deeply but also wants to. It also concerns the ways in which love for ones art can overlap into the relationships between all others who pass and join for a time on the same or similar journey. Confusion is also about what is hidden behind our social behaviors that take place in order that they may conceal our truths, and how important it is to eventually, and safely, reveal them. A riveting and, for me at least, an exciting and dramatic novella that constantly and consistently pounds away at the truth about passion and love and, for some, the dire memory of what was.

    Book preview

    Confusion - Stefan Zweig

    T

    HEY MEANT WELL

    , my students and colleagues in the Faculty: there it lies, solemnly presented and expensively bound, the first copy of the Festschrift dedicated to me by the members of the Department of Languages and Literature on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday and to mark my thirty years of academic teaching. It is nothing short of a complete biographical record: no minor essay of mine has been overlooked, no ceremonial address, no trifling review in the annual volume of some learned journal or other has failed to be exhumed from its papery grave by bibliographical industry—my entire career up to the present day is set out with impeccable clarity, step by step like a well-swept staircase—it would be truly ungrateful of me to take no pleasure in this touching diligence. What I myself had thought lost, spent and gone, returns to me united and well-ordered in the form presented here: no, I cannot deny that as an old man I now scan these pages with the same pride as did the schoolboy whose report from his teachers first indicated that he had the requisite ability and strength of mind for an academic career.

    And yet: when I had leafed through the two hundred industrious pages and looked my intellectual reflection in the eye, I couldn’t help smiling. Was that really my life, did it truly trace as purposeful a course with such ease, from the first to the present day, as the biographer describes, sorting the paper records into order? I felt exactly as I did when I first heard my own voice on a recording: initially I did not recognize it at all, for it was indeed my voice but only as others hear it, not as I hear it myself through my blood and within my very being, so to speak. And so I, who have spent a lifetime depicting human beings in the light of their work, portraying the intrinsic intellectual structure of their worlds, was made aware again from my own experience of the impenetrability in every human life of the true core of its being, the malleable cell from which all growth proceeds. We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

    The book says not a word about this most secret factor in my mental development: that was why I couldn’t help smiling. Everything it says is true—only what genuinely matters is missing. It merely describes me, it says nothing real about me. It speaks of me, but does not reveal what I am. The carefully compiled index comprises two hundred names—and the only one missing is the name of the man from whom all my creativity derived, who determined the course my life would take, and now calls me back to my youth with redoubled force. The book covers everything else, but not the man who gave me the gift of language and with whose tongue I speak: and suddenly I feel to blame for this craven silence. I have spent my life painting portraits of human beings, interpreting figures from past centuries for the benefit of today’s sensibilities, and never thought of turning to the picture of the one most present to my mind. As in Homeric days, then, I will give that beloved shade my own blood to drink, so that he may speak to me again, and although he grew old and died long ago, be with me now that I too am growing old. I will add a page not previously written to those on open display, a confession of feelings to be set beside that scholarly book, and for his sake I will tell myself the true story of my youth.

    B

    EFORE BEGINNING

    , I leaf once again through the book which claims to depict my life. And once again I cannot help smiling. How did they think they could reach the true core of my being when they chose to approach it in the wrong way? Even their very first step is wide of the mark! A former schoolmate, well disposed towards me and also a bearer of the honorary title of Privy Councillor, claims that even at grammar school my passion for the humanities distinguished me from all the other pupils. Your memory is at fault, my dear Privy Councillor! As far as I was concerned, anything in the way of humanist studies represented coercion which I could barely endure; I ground my teeth and fumed at it. For the very reason that, as the son of a headmaster in our small North German town, I was familiar at home with education as a means of earning a living, I hated everything to do with languages and literature from childhood: Nature, true to her mystic task of preserving the creative instinct, always impels the child to reject and despise its father’s inclinations. Nature does not want weak, conformist progeny, merely continuing from where the previous generation left off: she always sets those of a kind at loggerheads, allowing the later-born to return to the ways of their forefathers only after making a laborious but fruitful detour. My father had only to venerate scholarship for my self-assertive instinct to regard it as mere intellectual sophistry; he praised the classics as a model to be followed, so they seemed to me didactic and I hated them. Surrounded by books, I despised them; with my father constantly pressing intellectual pursuits on me, I felt furious dislike for every kind of knowledge passed on by written tradition; it was not surprising, therefore, that I barely scraped through my school-leaving examinations and then vigorously resisted any idea of continuing my studies. I wanted to be an army officer, or join the navy, or be an engineer, although I had no really compelling inclination for any of those professions. Only my distaste for the papery didacticism of scholarship made me wish for a practical and active rather than an academic career. But my father, with his fanatical veneration for universities and everything to do with them, insisted on my following a course of academic studies, and the only concession I could win was permission to choose English as my subject rather than classics (a compromise which I finally accepted with the private reservation that a knowledge of English, the language of the sea, would make it easier for me later to adopt the naval career I so fervently desired).

    Nothing could be further from the truth in that curriculum vitae of mine, then, than the well-meant statement that thanks to the guidance of meritorious professors I grasped the basic principles of the study of the arts in my first term—what did my passion for liberty, now impetuously breaking out, care then for lectures and lecturers? On my first brief visit to the lecture hall its stuffy atmosphere and the lecture itself, delivered in a monotonously clerical and self-important drone, so overcame me with weariness that it was an effort not to put my head down on the desk and doze off. Here I was back at the school I had thought myself so happy to escape, complete with classroom, teacher’s lectern in an excessively elevated position, and quibbling pedantry—I could not help feeling as if sand were running out of the thin-lipped open mouth of the Privy Councillor addressing us, so steadily did the words of the worn lecture notebook drop into the thick air. The suspicion I had entertained even as a schoolboy that I had entered a morgue of the spirit, where uncaring hands anatomized the dead, was revived to an alarming degree in this factory churning out second-hand Alexandrian philosophy—and how intensely did I feel that instinct of rejection the moment the lecture I had sat through with such difficulty was over, and I stepped out into the streets of the city, the Berlin of those days which, surprised by its own growth, was bursting with a virility too suddenly attained, sparks flying from all its stones and all its streets, while the feverishly vibrant pace of life forced itself irresistibly on everyone, and in its avid greed greatly resembled the intoxication of my own only recently recognized sense of virility. Both the city and I had suddenly emerged from a repressive petit bourgeois atmosphere of Protestant orderliness, and were plunged too rapidly into a new delirium of power and opportunity—both of us, the city and I, a young fellow starting out in life, vibrated like a dynamo with restlessness and impatience. I never understood and loved Berlin as much as I did then, for every cell in my being was crying out for sudden expansion, just like every part of that overflowing, warm human honeycomb—and where could the impatience of my forceful youth have released itself but in the throbbing womb of that heated giantess, that restless city radiating power? It grasped me and took me to itself, I flung myself into it, went down into its very veins, my curiosity rapidly orbiting its entire stony yet warm body—I walked its streets from morning to night,

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