Book description
My Three Lives was Stefan Zweig's working title for his memoir The
World of Yesterday, also published by Pushkin Press and translated by
Anthea Bell. In this definitive biography, Oliver Matuschek uses the
title to reference the three major phases in Zweig's life-his years of
apprenticeship, his years of success as a professional working writer in
Salzburg, and finally his years of exile in Britain, the USA and Brazil.
Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, Oliver Matuschek
recounts the eventful life of a writer spoilt by success-a life lived in
the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide
pact. Including the sort of personal detail conspicuously absent from
Zweig's memoir, and incorporating newly discovered documents,
Matuschek's biography offers us a privileged view into the private world
of the master of psychological insight.
Oliver Matuschek was born in Braunschweig, Germany in 1971. He worked
at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum between 2000 and 2004 and helped
curate the exhibition The Three Lives of Stefan Zweig at the Deutsches
Historisches Museum, Berlin in 2008.
He has co-authored several documentaries and published numerous works
on literary and historical themes, including “I Know the Magic of
Handwriting”: a Catalogue and History of the Autograph Collection of
Stefan Zweig.
Allan Blunden is an acclaimed translator, specialising in German
literature. He was awarded the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck prize for
his translation of Erhard Eppler's The Return of the State? in 2011.
