Stefan Zweig

Éloge du livre

May 22, 2025
Essay
192 pages
115 × 190 mm
12 €
9791039206433
979-1-0392-0643-3

“Le Domaine” collection

																Stefan Zweig, Éloge du livre
																Stefan Zweig, Éloge du livre

A beautiful meditation on the power of reading.

In June 1905, at the age of 23, Stefan Zweig left Paris for Algiers, departing from Genoa via Naples and Tunis. Twenty-six years later, he recalled an episode that made him realize, having published only a few short stories and translations, “the power of books to open vast horizons to our souls and organize our personal lives.” It is this “spiritual revelation” that he describes in Éloge du livre, published in a German-language Hungarian newspaper in 1931. On the Italian steamer crossing the Mediterranean, Zweig befriends a young cabin boy, Giovanni, barely older than himself. During a stop in Naples, Giovanni asks him to read a letter received from his fiancée. Zweig is shocked, suddenly understanding that his companion is illiterate. And he suddenly realizes what isolation, “walled within himself,” is experienced by someone who has never read a book, a “poor eunuch of the mind.”

This beautiful meditation on the powers of reading, this “indestructible force”, is one of Zweig’s most beautiful texts—and one of the least known. It is followed in this edition by about ten other texts on literature and writers, including some previously unpublished in book form: his preface to Andreas Latzko’s Le dernier homme (1920), portraits of Franz Hellens (1923) or Sigmund Freud (1926 and 1936), a tribute to Bernard Grasset as a writer (1930), a preface to La Chaise électrique, a novel by Chalom Asch (1931)…

The author

Writer, philosopher, translator, great traveler and citizen of the world, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was one of the most eminent chroniclers of Europe in perdition during the interwar period. Horrified by the rise of Nazism, the Austrian-born Jewish author decided to exile himself across the Atlantic, where he ended his life, leaving behind a masterful body of work, infused with his pacifist and humanist ideals.

Strong points

Do we ever know what the past holds for us? The “Le Domaine” collection, of which Éloge du livre is one of the first four titles, makes available works from the public domain that are unfindable, surprising, or unpublished. In this constantly expanding universe, discoveries will be in order; for, to quote Italo Calvino, “classics are books that prove more new, unexpected, and unheard of the more we thought we knew them by hearsay”;

one of Zweig’s most beautiful texts on the power of reading was strictly unfindable an anthology of texts on literature and artistic creation, some of which are unpublished;

an introduction of a few pages presents the author and the genesis of the book.

May 22, 2025
Essay
192 pages
115 × 190 mm
12 €
9791039206433
979-1-0392-0643-3

“Le Domaine” collection