The Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig.
In Struggle with the Daemon Stefan Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche — powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works. In their struggle with their inner creative force, Zweig reflects the conflict at the heart of the European soul between science and art, reason and inspiration. Both highly personal and philosophically wide-ranging, this is one of the most fascinating of Zweig’s renowned biographical studies.
Over de auteur
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.