Leyendas

Stefan Zweig was an astonishingly prolific writer who cultivated, with great success, a whole range of literary genres that included everything from the novel and the theater to the short story and translation, from the monograph or the essay to the biography, criticism and poetry. . To these genres must also be added the legend, which had famous predecessors in the German world, such as Heine, Schiller, Hesse or Goethe. In legend as a genre, Zweig believed he found an intimate form that allowed him to convey a series of experiences and aspirations under the cloak of fiction, but without dispensing with a moralizing or, at least, admonition purpose. These five legends were written at different stages of Zweig's life: during the First World War and during his years in exile with his wife. Each one faithfully reveals the concerns of an author who lived through turbulent and unfortunate times, and allows us to penetrate the ins and outs of his personality, verify which events affected him the most, what were his obsessions, and how he struggled to resolve paradoxes and contradictions that gripped his soul. In them we witness his search for the meaning of life, his desperate efforts to know himself and to find something that generates hope and certainty in this world.