Adepts In Self Portraiture Casanova Stendhal Tolstoy

Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy: Adepts in Self-Portraiture

Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy: Adepts in Self-Portraiture, the final volume of Stefan Zweig's masterful Master Builders of the Spirit trilogy, discloses the smaller version of a writer's own ego. Unconscious though it is, no reality is as important to the writer as the reality of their own life. Giacomo Casanova, Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), and Leo Tolstoy have different approaches to self-portraiture, but Zweig shows that together they symbolize three levels which represent successively ascending gradations of the same creative function. Casanova is depicted as having a primitive gradation; he simply records deeds and happenings, without any attempt to appraise them or to study the deeper working of the self. Stendhal's self-portraiture is depicted as psychological; he observes himself and investigates his own feelings. Tolstoy has the highest level; he describes his own life, records what led him to his own actions, and focuses on self-reflection in a completely unexaggerated manner. At first glance it might seem as if self-portraiture is an artist's easiest task. With no further trouble than a probing of memory and a description of the facts of life, "the truth" is revealed. The history of literature shows that ordinary autobiographers are no more than commonplace witnesses testifying to facts that chance has brought to their knowledge. A practiced artist is needed to discern the innermost happenings of the soul; few who have attempted autobiography have been successful in this difficult task. The present volume expounds the characteristics of these subjectively minded artists, and of autobiography as their typical method of personal expression.

Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy

Written in the 1920s, Zweig's work of literary criticism and biography might today be titled Masters of Memoir. In it, Stefan Zweig – one of the 20th century’s most widely-published writers – describes the creative process and work of authors for whom no subject is as compelling as the material of their own lives. Adepts in Self-Portraiture examines the lives and work of three men who represent, in Zweig's view, three levels of development in autobiographical writing. The first and most basic level is evinced by Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian womanizer who records his sexual and social conquests, adventures and escapes, without attempting to analyze or even reflect on them. The second level of self-portraiture is exemplified by Stendhal, the French pioneer of psychological fiction, who kept voluminous notebooks on his own experience of life and on whom no nuance of feeling seems to have been lost. Russian master Leo Tolstoy represents the third and highest level of autobiographical writing in which the psychological is imbued with the spiritual and ethical. In Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Stefan Zweig examines the impulses that give rise to life writing and anticipates the current popularity of the memoir form.

Adepts in Self-portraiture