Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in
a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of
different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the
world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at
fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted
Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth
century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason
that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in
ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of
the world.
Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely
great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the
writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true
novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series
of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is
endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who
constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making,
giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures.
Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his
own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the
family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A
comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences.
Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the
national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or
antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own
boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c
gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in
the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message
of this book.
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