BEWARE OF PITY is Stefan Zweig’s only novel and is a devastatingly sober realisation of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, set against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1913, a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers of pity and eventually flees from them into the battlefield. His involvement begins with a faux pas: he had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance. Paying her an occasional afternoon call seemed to give him a new sense of purpose and he did not notice how imperceptibly bound up with tenderness his concern might be. But he was gradually to learn that pity, like morphia, is only a first solace to the invalid and unless one knows the exact dosage, and when to stop, it can become a virulent poison.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
TRANSLATED BY Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt
Cover illustration : Gustav Klimt
ISBN 1 901 285 49 9
