1914 yılında Rava-Ruska'da bir Avusturya hafif süvari alayıyla katıldığı çarpışmalarda şehit düşen Baron Fredrich M. von R.nin yazı masasında bulunan notlar daha sonra ailesi tarafından gözden geçirilmesi istenerek yazara verilmiş. Stefan Zweig de sadece altı saatlik bir zaman dilimini kapsayan bu olağanüstü geceyi sadece ismini değiştirerek Olağanüstü Bir Gece kitabı ile yazıya dökmüş. Baron Fredrich'in hikayesi ise şöyle;

Tarihler 7 Haziran 1913 ü gösterdiğinde otuz altı yaşındaki barona erken ölen ailesinden bir miras kalmıştı. Kendisi bu fırsatı iyi değerlendirerek subaylık mesleğinden vazgeçmiş ve kendince emekliye ayrılmıştı. Ailesi soylu bir sınıftan geliyordu, normalde de durumu oldukça iyiydi. Üstüne bir de bu miras gelince tamamen zengin ve soylu bir aristokrat olmuştu. Tüm ilgi alanını lüks ve çok nadir uğraşlara ayırıyordu. Mesela antikacılardan nadir parçalar bularak bunları uygun bir sistemle dizmek ona çok keyif verirken, o günlerin en çok okunan kitaplarına ilk sahip olmak da bir diğer uğraşıydı. Tabii birde kadınlar vardı. Kadınlar kesinlikle ilgi alanına giriyordu. Fakat tüm bu zengin yaşayış bir süre sonra onu derin bir durgunluğa soktu. Tam altı ay sürecek bu uzun durgunluk döneminde tüm heveslerinden uzaklaştı. Artık ne kitaplar ne pahalı antikalar ne de kadınlar ona heyecan veriyordu. Sıradan bir hayatın tam içindeydi. Ta ki o olağanüstü geceye kadar.

O gün evden bir anlığına çıktı ve etrafın oldukça kalabalık olduğunu faytonların soyluları ve sosyeteden tanıdığı simaları sırayla götürdüklerini gördü. O da hemen bir faytona atladı. Arabacının sorusu ise bütün olayı açıklıyordu. Arabacı " At yarışlarına değil mi efendim? "demişti. Baron da bu soruya başını sallayarak cevap vermiş ve kendisini bir anda yarışlarda bulmuştu. Aslında altı ay öncesine kadar böyle olayları hiç kaçırmazdı. İçeri girdiğinde herkesin sıralarına oturduğunu, çok özenle giyindiklerini görmüştü. Yarışın başlamasıyla tüm soylular sanki bambaşka insan oluvermişlerdi. Bağırıyor, kazanmasını istedikleri atın ismini haykırıyorlardı. Bu heyecan bir anda baronu etkiledi. Çünkü onun uzun zamandır hissedemediği bir duyguyu tüm bu insanlar yaşıyorlardı. Ardından yarışlara biraz ara verildi. Bu ara esnasında baronun gözü bir hanımefendiye takılmıştı. Çok güzel ve alımlı olan bu kadın adeta gözleriyle barona cilve yapıyordu. Bu durum yine hoşuna gitti baronun. Çünkü gizli bir oyun ona heyecan vermişti. Fakat kadının yanında birden şişman ve kel bir adam belirdi. Elini kadının omzuna atmasıyla baron onun kadının kocası olduğunu anladı. Artık oyun bitmiş ve heyecanını yitirmişti. Yarışlar tekrar başlarken bir anda kargaşa oldu. Şişman ve kel adam o karmaşayla elindeki tüm kuponları düşürdü. Bir tane kuponda baronun ayağına denk geldi. Eline aldığı sırada yarış başladı. Maçı takip etmeye ve heyecanlanmaya başladı. Çünkü kuponundaki at yeniyordu. Yarış bitti ve tüm ikramiyeyi baron aldı.

Bu suç işleme duygusu ve yaşadığı heyecan ona tekrar bilet aldırttı. Yine maçı o kazandı ve çok fazla parası oldu. Fakat baron bu durumdan hiç memnun değildi. Soylu birisine hiç yakışmıyordu bu durum. Üzgün bir şekilde panayır gibi bir yere girdi. Burada insanların arasına karışmak ve durgunluğunun nedenini anlamaya çalışıyordu. Gece yarısına kadar yanına kimse gelmedi. Hatta insanlar ondan uzaklaşıyor gibiydi. Çünkü kıyafeti ve duruşuyla soylu biri olduğunu belli ediyordu. Dükkanlar ve lunapark kapanınca baronun yanında biri geldi. Bu bir fahişeydi. İlk kez birinin dikkatini çektiği için heyecan duydu ve onun peşinden gitti. Fakat biraz uzaklaşınca arkasında iki kişinin olduğunu gördü. Kadına çok yüklü bir para verdi ve arkasındaki iki kişiye de acıyarak onlara da para verdi. Para alan bu aciz insanların yüzündeki mutluluk ona çok büyük bir his yaşattı.

O akşam gördüğü herkese yardım etmek istedi. Baloncunun tüm balonlarını satın aldı, kek satan yaşlı kadının önünden kek alarak yüklü bahşiş bıraktı. Evlerin camlarından içeri paralar attı. En sonunda hayatının amacını ve kendi benliğini buldu. O akşamdan sonra çok mutlu ve bilinçli bir insan olarak yaşamaya devam etti. Hiç yalnızlık çekmedi aksine artık sokakta gördüğü her insanla muhabbet ediyor, yardımlaşıyor ve artık yalnızlık duygusunu zerre kadar hissetmiyordu.

A brief survey of the short story part 18: Stefan Zweig
https://www.theguardian.com

For Stefan Zweig, the first and second world wars destroyed an entire way of life, one kept alive in his subtle, striking, page-turning stories

'A citizen of the world' … The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942).

Thursday 11 June 2009 11.18 BST First published on Thursday 11 June 2009 11.18 BST Despite being one of the most famous writers in the world during the 1920s and 30s, Stefan Zweig's reputation faded considerably – and almost totally in English-speaking countries – following the second world war. Over the past few years, however, his star has once more been in the ascendant. That many of his stories are in print again is thanks, in this country at least, to Pushkin Press, whose stewardship of European literature in translation is one of the more praiseworthy publishing endeavours of the past decade. The primary reasons why Zweig's stories are so worthy of reclamation from obscurity are straightforward and compelling: the stories are imbued with tremendous psychological acuity; they are as page-turning as they are subtle; and the profound moral sense which underpins them never tips over into moralising.

To fully understand Zweig, who was a non-practising Jew, it is necessary to be aware of the value he placed on his identity as a European and as a citizen of the world, as opposed to of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Born into a wealthy Viennese family in 1881, Zweig wrote in his posthumously published memoir, The World of Yesterday (1943), that his parents regarded their environment "as if it had been a house of stone". "Today, now that the great storm has long since smashed it, we finally know that that world of security was naught but a castle of dreams."

By far the most effective and striking part of Zweig's fictional oeuvre is precisely to do with this disappearance of the old world and its cultural values, and with the war that destroyed them. It might be thought that harking back to the "good old days" of the Austro-Hungarian empire makes Zweig a decadent but, as Paul Bailey has noted, "Zweig puts decadence in perspective, neither revelling in its attractiveness not castigating its more squalid aspects. It is his aesthetic purpose to sound the human note, and to do so in such a disarming manner as to shame the reader who has already made facile judgements." Additionally, Zweig was a committed pacifist and worked throughout the first world war to disseminate his beliefs, combining in this mission with the French writer Romain Rolland.

Zweig's story Compulsion (1920), one of his finest, concerns Ferdinand, an artist who has fled to Switzerland to avoid enlistment. When his call-up orders eventually find him, he feels unaccountably obliged to comply, much to his wife's disgust. Zweig writes: "He felt that somehow or other his name had hooked him from behind to haul him back into that bloodstained thicket, that something he didn't know, although it knew him, was not about to let him go." The tension generated by Ferdinand's conflicted sense of duty, pacifist beliefs and love for his wife is extraordinarily powerful.

Several more of his stories unfold beneath the war's ominous shadow. Fantastic Night (1922) purports to be the memoir of a baron who has fallen at the battle of Rawa-Ruska in 1914; in the unfinished Wondrak, written during the war, a Bohemian mother's obsessive love for her son pits her against the Imperial authorities; Incident On Lake Geneva (1936) sees an isolated Russian soldier drown while trying to return to his family; Jacob Mendel, the titular bibliophilic genius of Buchmendel, is a political innocent whose life is heartbreakingly ruined when he is suspected of being a spy.

In each of these stories, innocence, promise or the pacifist's moral standpoint are either snuffed out or gravely threatened. Zweig variously describes the war as Europe's "fit of drunkenness", "this foolish prank played by diplomats and generals left to their own devices", "a strange and pitiless force treading a whole world underfoot", and the reason for "those little crosses ... that now cover the continent of Europe from end to end".

It is commonly held to be the case that Zweig, having fled mainland Europe for Britain as his books were burned at Berlin University before moving to Brazil, killed himself alongside his wife in 1942 due to the news of Japan's advances in the far east. I am persuaded, however, by Clive James's opinion that this final act was of a piece with Zweig's disconsolate grief for a vanished world; that although "he already knew that the Nazis weren't going to win the war ... [he] thought they had already won the war that mattered."
 

Stefan Zweig’s “Fantastic Night and Other Stories – Tales of Longing and Liberation”


Ivy Ngeow THE READING LIFE, THE WRITING LIFE, UNCATEGORISED 1920s, Austria, Books, grandbudapesthotel, modernfiction, reading, reviews, shortstories, stefanzweig, Vienna, wesanderson, 29TH APRIL 2016

“Fantastic Night and Other Stories” was written in 1922. Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 to a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. He moved everywhere after he was a student in Berlin, he ended in London and New York and finally Brazil. He died in a double suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942. These are “Tales of Longing and Liberation” says the inside of the front cover. These are loose terms and indeed I did not have any idea or want to have any idea what they meant. Zweig was an inspiration for Wes Anderson‘s Grand Budapest Hotel. You are probably thinking the same thing. Yep. Moustache.

is the first and the longest (54 pages) of the collection. The main character, unnamed, tells his story through the narrator being given the text of the story that is to be told. This was quite a modern psychological concept of the time, which also means that it is dated and contextual. “Fantastic Night” (I love the title BTW, I really think the writer has totally captured our hearts and our imagination because you straightaway want to know what is it about the night that was fantastic?) is about man’s spiritual awakening. That night, became the pivot on which my whole existence turns.

Turning is always a good theme for a story, that is the transformation for which the reader is looking. And before that night, the main character was a wealthy, seemingly worry-free, successful yet vacuous 36 year old man, someone who was trite and childish. Money does do that to people. Therefore the universal themes did apply then. How many successful vacuous people do you know?

I did not lack for success with women, and here too, with the secret collector’s urge which in a way indicates a lack of real involvement, I chalked up many memorable and precious hours of varied experience. In this field I gradually moved from being a mere sensualist to the status of a knowledgeable connoisseur. … But nothing stirred, I felt as if I were made of glass, with the world outside shining through me and never lingering within…

The scene at the races which was his so -called pivot, took a tad too long. I really wanted to know why Zweig could not get the story told quicker. Maybe it is that archaic suspenseful literary technique of storytelling which grates on me. The character experiences and toys with a minor indiscretion (well, basically, overt flirting with a married lady), leading to the pull of criminality

Where the “criminality” referred to is how he managed to pull wool over the woman’s husband’s eyes, cheated the stupid bloke of his winnings, in order to impress the woman he was flirting with (who was BTW not pretty but fat and red-faced yet someone he found attractive because of her raucous, dirty laugh), and then to return the cheated money in an over-the-top overpayment secret gesture.

I felt myself, desiccated as I was, suddenly flowering again.

The word desiccated was very evocative of a decadent period, decaying morals, old money, despair, coconut. Although it was predictable but open conclusion, I think the darkness, moral nature and long-windedness of the story actually contributed to its power and I found it satisfyingly morbid.

Once a man has found himself, there is nothing in this world that he can lose.

I think that is really beautifully said. This is a metaphysical story that actually brings about ideas, a story that makes you think. You cannot read this without thinking: you won’t be able to enjoy its richness. This is where the universal themes come into play. A rich man must start from scratch in order to live. That is the moral of the story.

“The Governess”

was quite a brief old-fashioned story. Very simply it was about a nanny that got pregnant by Otto the lodger (a university student) of the household and she was so vehemently berated by her employer that she did something terrible to herself. The parents are supposedly on the moral high ground, they are cold, unfeeling and needless to say, wealthy (or wealthy enough to afford the nanny). The Frau of the house refers to the Fraulein’s condition:

“Excuses, excuses! Every promiscuous girl will offer that excuse! She’ll blame the first man who comes to mind and thinking nothing of it, hoping the good Lord will come to her aid. And a woman like that claims to be a governess and fit to educate girls. It’s outrageous. You sure don’t imagine that, in your condition, I shall keep you in my household any longer?”

This story was actually told in the third person, but from the children’s POV. I was very sad and frightened for the children she cared for, for truly they cared for her and thought she was very ill. They took the trouble to take their own money and buy white roses for her because they knew that she loved them. But it was too late. In this story, it was clear that the children were severely affected and upset because they were so attached to the nanny and the nanny to them.

“Letter from an Unknown Woman”

was the most powerful story in the colleciton, IMHO. I could not stop reading it. It was totally gripping and unsettling. The story spans a woman’s entire lifetime, from childhood to her early demise. The character that the story is about is not this woman, that is why this is such a clever story. That main character is a successful writer, who never speaks, to whom the entire story is addressed in second person, who receives a letter from a woman who is dying who turns out to have known and devoted herself to him all her life, from childhood onwards.

However, I did not guess that at the time age of thirteen, still a child, it was as it I had been immersed in fire. I though the tenderness was only for me, for me alone, and in that one second, the woman latent in my adolescent self awoke, and she in thrall to you for ever.

At first I thought this must be a stalker story. How foolish and modern I am. Turns out I am wrong.

The woman returns, becomes his lover, becomes mother to his child, becomes a prostitute and therefore making the writer her client in order to raise the child with middle-class luxuries, and all the time dedicated to him. She gave him so many chances to recognise her, as the little girl in the hallway of the apartment building they all lived in, who looked at him through the keyhole who grew up and left the apartment block and came back to become his lover. He never recognised her in more than twenty years despite having met her, fancied her, shagged her so many times. This story was about this character who was truly so solipsistic and narcissistic that he became blind and deaf to someone else, anyone else. They might as well not exist. And now they did not. It was too late, the letter said the son, their son, was ill and had died, and now she was dying too. Quite a depressing story and there is no light coming in from the window at any point. It was a dark, moving and disturbing story. Nuff said.

Conclusion :

This is a fine glittering collection, will suit anybody who is a fan of that period of literature, the Viennese tradition, the Grand Budapest Hotel, the deepest, darkest moments of human emotions, loss, gripping passions, intense encounters. Very very excellent reading. It will transform your one evening into a “Fantastic Night”.