{"product_id":"nietzsche-isbn-9781782276364","title":"Nietzsche","description":"\u003cb\u003eA scintillating biographical study of the one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this vivid biography, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. This work, concentrating on the man rather than the work, on the tragedy of his existence and his apartness from the world in which he moved in enforced isolation, is a tour de force, drawing the reader inexorably into Nietzsche's tragic trajectory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIllustrated with numerous photographs relating to Nietzsche and his European locations, this superb translation by Will Stone is essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche, Zweig, first-class biographies and philosophy.'Zweig's accumulated historical and cultural studies [are] almost too impressive to take in.’ — \u003cb\u003eClive James\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Zweig         is the most adult of writers: civilised, urbane, but never jaded or         cynical; a realist who none the less believe in the possibility – the         necessity – of empathy.’ — \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eIndependent\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘Zweig… deserves to be famous again, and for good.’ — \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTLS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eZweig's   accumulated historical and cultural studies [are] almost too impressive to   take in. -- Clive JamesStefan Zweig was one of the most popular and widely translated writers of the early twentieth century. Born into an Austrian-Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna's cosmopolitan cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and vivid psychological biographies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1934, following the Nazis' rise to power, Zweig fled Austria, first for England, where he wrote his famous novel Beware of Pity, then the United States and finally Brazil. It was here that he completed his acclaimed autobiography The World of Yesterday, a lament for the golden age of a Europe destroyed by two world wars. The articles and speeches in Messages from a Lost World were written as Zweig, a pacifist and internationalist, witnessed this destruction and warned of the threat to his beloved Europe. On 23 February 1942, Zweig and his second wife Lotte were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.\u003cb\u003eI\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eTragedy without a Cast\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To profit most from existence, man must live dangerously.\u003cbr\u003e The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other\u003cbr\u003e figure is present on the brief lived stage of his existence. Across\u003cbr\u003e the acts of this tragedy, which crash down and surge on like\u003cbr\u003e an avalanche, the isolated combatant stands alone beneath\u003cbr\u003e the stormy sky of his own destiny; nobody is alongside him,\u003cbr\u003e nobody is opposing him and no woman is there to momentarily\u003cbr\u003e relax the overstrung atmosphere with her presence. Every\u003cbr\u003e movement issues from him alone and he is its sole witness:\u003cbr\u003e the few figures who at the outset linger in his shadow can only\u003cbr\u003e accompany his heroic enterprise with gestures of dumb astonishment\u003cbr\u003e and alarm and little by little distance themselves from\u003cbr\u003e him as if from some danger. Not a single being dare properly\u003cbr\u003e enter the inner sanctum of that destiny; always Nietzsche\u003cbr\u003e speaks, struggles, suffers for himself alone. He addresses no\u003cbr\u003e one and no one responds. Worst of all: no one is even listening.\u003cbr\u003e There are no other people, no fellows, no listeners in this\u003cbr\u003e unique tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but neither is there a\u003cbr\u003e stage, scenery or costume, for it plays out, so to speak, only in\u003cbr\u003e the airless space of the idea. Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento,\u003cbr\u003e Sils-Maria, Genoa, these names were not those of Nietzsche’s\u003cbr\u003e homes, but merely a series of milestones along a road travelled\u003cbr\u003e in a burning flight, the cold colourless wings of the theatre.\u003cbr\u003e In truth the scene of this tragedy always remains the same:\u003cbr\u003e isolation, solitude, that cruelly wordless responseless solitude\u003cbr\u003e that his thought carries within and around itself like an opaque\u003cbr\u003e bell-jar, a solitude without flowers or colours, without sounds,\u003cbr\u003e animals or people, a solitude deprived even of God, the extinct\u003cbr\u003e and stony solitude of some primeval world existing before\u003cbr\u003e or beyond time. What makes this desolation so harrowing\u003cbr\u003e and ghastly, so truly grotesque, is that this glacier, this desert\u003cbr\u003e of solitude occurred at the heart of an Americanized Germany\u003cbr\u003e of some seventy million inhabitants, in the rattling and whirring\u003cbr\u003e of telegraphs and trains, of cries and tumult, at the centre\u003cbr\u003e of a morbidly prurient culture which every year launches\u003cbr\u003e forty thousand volumes into the world, that every day searches\u003cbr\u003e around a thousand different problems in a hundred universities,\u003cbr\u003e that every day stages tragedies in hundreds of theatres, and\u003cbr\u003e yet knows nothing, divines nothing and senses nothing of the\u003cbr\u003e great drama of the spirit unfolding right in their midst.\u003cbr\u003e For it was precisely at its most sublime moments that the\u003cbr\u003e tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche failed to find spectator, listener,\u003cbr\u003e or sole witness in the German world. At the beginning when he\u003cbr\u003e is in a position to proclaim from the lofty heights of his professorial\u003cbr\u003e lectern and the spotlight of Wagner finds him, his discourse\u003cbr\u003e secures a measure of regard. But the deeper he descends\u003cbr\u003e inside himself, the more he plunges into the far reaches of time,\u003cbr\u003e the less any response is detected. One after another, friends,\u003cbr\u003e strangers, stand up shocked, in the course of his heroic monologues,\u003cbr\u003e alarmed by the ever more wild transformations, the\u003cbr\u003e ever more heated frenzies of horrifying solitude, and abandon\u003cbr\u003e him on the stage of his destiny. Little by little the tragic actor\u003cbr\u003e becomes agitated at declaiming into a void, so he begins to\u003cbr\u003e raise his voice, to shout and gesticulate more wildly to create an\u003cbr\u003e echo or at least a contradiction. To harmonise with his words,\u003cbr\u003e he invents a surging, intoxicating, Dionysian music – but now\u003cbr\u003e no one is listening. He tries a harlequinesque turn, ascribes to\u003cbr\u003e a forced gaiety, strident and piercing; he builds into his phrases\u003cbr\u003e all manner of twists and turns (mimicking comic improvisations),\u003cbr\u003e just to attract through artificial amusements, listeners to\u003cbr\u003e his deadly earnest evangel, but no hand is moved to applaud.\u003cbr\u003e Finally he invents a dance, a dance of swords and, butchered,\u003cbr\u003e torn, bloodied, he performs his new deadly art to the public,\u003cbr\u003e but no one guesses the significance of these shrill jokes, nor\u003cbr\u003e the passion wounded to death that exists in this affected lightheartedness.\u003cbr\u003e Without listeners or echo, the most extraordinary\u003cbr\u003e drama of the spirit ever granted to our troubled century is\u003cbr\u003e played out to its bitter end before an empty house. No one\u003cbr\u003e turns their glance even cursorily towards him, when the whirligig\u003cbr\u003e of his thoughts spinning on a steel point leaps exuberantly\u003cbr\u003e for the last time and finally falls, exhausted on the ground –\u003cbr\u003e ‘Dead by immortality’.\u003cbr\u003e This aloneness with the self, this solitary state of being face to\u003cbr\u003e face with the self, is in the deepest sense the exceptional sacred\u003cbr\u003e affliction of that tragedy which was Friedrich Nietzsche’s existence.\u003cbr\u003e Never was such an imposing consummation of the spirit,\u003cbr\u003e such an extreme bacchanal of feeling placed before such a\u003cbr\u003e colossal void of the world, in the face of such a metallically inviolable\u003cbr\u003e silence. Nietzsche never even had the fortune to find\u003cbr\u003e worthy adversaries; so the most powerful will of thought,\u003cbr\u003e ‘closed in on itself and burrowing deep into itself’, was obliged\u003cbr\u003e to seek out a response and a resistance in his own breast, in his\u003cbr\u003e own tragic soul. It wasn’t the world, but the bleeding strips of\u003cbr\u003e his own skin that this spirit raging with destiny tore away, like\u003cbr\u003e Heracles, his Nessus shirt, with that burning desire to be bared\u003cbr\u003e before ultimate truth, to confront himself. But what glacial chill\u003cbr\u003e accompanies this nakedness, what silence around this cry of the\u003cbr\u003e spirit without precedent, what terrible sky crossed by storm\u003cbr\u003e clouds and lightning, above this ‘God murderer’, who now having\u003cbr\u003e encountered no adversary turns on his own being, ‘Knower\u003cbr\u003e of himself, torturer of himself, merciless one’. Hounded by his\u003cbr\u003e demon beyond time and the world, beyond even the furthest\u003cbr\u003e limits of his being.\u003cbr\u003e Shaken alas! by unknown fevers,\u003cbr\u003e Trembling before airborne icy shafts,\u003cbr\u003e Hunted down by you, oh thought!\u003cbr\u003e Inexpressible! Sinister! Horrifying!\u003cbr\u003e Sometimes he recoils quivering, with a nameless look of terror,\u003cbr\u003e when he recognises to what extent his life has rushed beyond\u003cbr\u003e all that was living and all that had been. But an impulse so\u003cbr\u003e powerful can no longer be restrained: with surging confidence\u003cbr\u003e and hugely intoxicated with his own self, he accomplishes the\u003cbr\u003e destiny that his beloved Hölderlin had prefigured for him – that\u003cbr\u003e of Empedocles.\u003cbr\u003e Heroic landscape devoid of sky, sublime performance without\u003cbr\u003e an audience and silence, a silence growing ever more intense\u003cbr\u003e around the unbearable cry of this lonely spirit, that is the tragedy\u003cbr\u003e of Friedrich Nietzsche. We should abhor them, as the\u003cbr\u003e numberless insensate cruelties of nature were it not for the fact\u003cbr\u003e that he himself selected and embraced them ecstatically, adoring\u003cbr\u003e them for their unique harshness and solely because of that\u003cbr\u003e uniqueness. For voluntarily, in all lucidity, renouncing a secure\u003cbr\u003e existence, he constructs this ‘unconventional life’ with the most\u003cbr\u003e profound tragic instinct, defying the gods with unrivalled courage,\u003cbr\u003e to ‘experience himself the highest degree of danger in which\u003cbr\u003e a man can live’. ‘Χαιρετε δαιυονε_! Hail, demons!’ It was with\u003cbr\u003e this jocular cry of hubris, that once, one evening, in the light\u003cbr\u003e hearted manner of students, Nietzsche and his philosopher\u003cbr\u003e friends summon up supernatural powers: at the hour when the\u003cbr\u003e spirits are abroad, they pour through the open window the red\u003cbr\u003e wine from their brimful glasses into the sleepy Basel street as\u003cbr\u003e a libation to the unseen, an imaginative jape, but one which harbours\u003cbr\u003e a more serious presentiment nonetheless: for the demons\u003cbr\u003e hearken to this call and pursue the one who defied them, turning\u003cbr\u003e an evening lark into the monumental tragedy of a destiny.\u003cbr\u003e And yet, Nietzsche never shrinks from the colossal demands\u003cbr\u003e by which he feels irresistibly seized and drawn: the harder the\u003cbr\u003e hammer strikes, the clearer the tone from the bronze anvil of his\u003cbr\u003e will. And on this anvil, made red hot from the mighty flame,\u003cbr\u003e is forged, ever more powerfully and reinforced with each blow,\u003cbr\u003e the watchword which would armour his mind in bronze; ‘the\u003cbr\u003e greatness of man’ \u003ci\u003eamor fati\u003c\/i\u003e: never seeking to change the past,\u003cbr\u003e the future, eternity; not to just bear necessity, much less to conceal\u003cbr\u003e it, but to love it. This ardent song of love addressed to the\u003cbr\u003e spirits, covers like a dithyramb the cry of his own pain: bent to\u003cbr\u003e the ground, crushed by the world’s silence, eaten up by himself,\u003cbr\u003e seared by the bitterness of suffering, never once does he raise\u003cbr\u003e his hands to ask of fate to finally forsake him. On the contrary,\u003cbr\u003e he demands still greater adversity, deeper solitude, a larger\u003cbr\u003e capacity for suffering. Not in defence does he raise his hands,\u003cbr\u003e but to launch the glorious prayer of heroes: ‘Oh will of my soul,\u003cbr\u003e that I call fate, you within me! You above me! Enshrine me and\u003cbr\u003e preserve me for a great destiny.’\u003cbr\u003e Whosoever offers up such grandiose prayers must surely be\u003cbr\u003e heard.","brand":"Pushkin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302361256165,"sku":"NP9781782276364","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781782276364.jpg?v=1767733709","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/nietzsche-isbn-9781782276364","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}