Beware of Pity

By Stefan Zweig
Translated from the German by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt
Introduction by Joan Acocella

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.

Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host’s lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

Reviews

In Zweig's fiction, someone in the story, in a way everyone, has a terrible secret. Secrets are integral to adventure stories [and] the experience of reading Zweig is not so much of entering the world of the story as of plunging inward and dreaming the story.
— Rachel Cohen, Bookforum

Zweig's fictional masterpiece evokes the point at which Europe was pitched into chaos, beginning with a cavalry officer's faux-pas in a fusty drawing room, and concluding with the bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. . . . Zweig constructs a devastating account of what happens when pity is misconstrued as love and brilliantly relays the catastrophic effects of arousing unwanted passion.
— Alfred Hickling, The Guardian

Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist; it's good to have him back.
— Salman Rushdie

Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original and powerful work.... Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could dare to attempt.... Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he seemed to be—in his novelettes and biographies—before he wrote it: a brilliant writer...
— The New York Times

Also see:

Chess Story By Stefan Zweig Introduction by Peter Gay New translation by Joel Rotenberg A new English translation of the international psychological thriller Schachnovelle.

The Post-Office Girl By Stefan Zweig Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg Zweig's posthumously discovered novel, about the rise and fall of a provincial Austrian girl invited to the Swiss Alps by her wealthy American aunt, is available in English for the first time.

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