Diarios

Stefan Zweig's diaries comprise nearly thirty years of the writer's life, and due to their spontaneity they are an irreplaceable document, as well as a great counterpoint to his autobiography The World of Yesterday. The pages of this volume, often dictated by the urgency of the moment but as lucid as his more elaborate texts, reveal to us the daily life of the writer in Vienna, Paris, Zurich or Bern -where he cultivated the friendship of other intellectuals, such as Émile Verhaeren, Romain Rolland and Rainer Maria Rilke-, or the fascination that two American cities such as New York and Rio de Janeiro produced in him. But they also reveal the intimate horror of the Great War for Zweig and, two decades later, the continent's totalitarian and anti-Semitic drift and the rise of Nazism, which pushed him desperately to seek refuge far from the heartbreaking collapse of Europe. These newspapers once again give us the voice of the great chronicler of the world of yesterday, who in many moments seems to continue to reveal to us that of today and perhaps even that of tomorrow.