Novels by Stefan Zweig are golden classics of European psychological realism from the early 20th century.
They were adapted into films by the geniuses of European and American cinema during its "golden age": Robert Land, Max Ophüls, Etienne Perrier, and Robert Siodmak. Generations of European and Russian readers grew up with these works.
Each of these stories continues to delight, enrage, provoke arguments with the author and his characters, inspire love and hate, condemnation and forgiveness. The secret of the "agelessness" of Zweig's stories is simple, he invariably wrote about passion. Uncontrollable, frenzied, painful love, whether for a man or a woman, for parents or for books, for money or for a game, for adventure or for power over others. There are feelings and desires that never change, and Zweig, like no one else, knew how to describe them.
