In this blog post, we’ll examine—through ‘Zweig’s Biography of Balzac’—the blend of folly and greatness in the life of the great writer Balzac, as well as the literary perspective through which Stefan Zweig viewed him.
Balzac: A Man Who Lived Through a Turbulent Era
Balzac’s life was more colorful and fascinating than most novels. The early 19th century in France, during which he lived, was a turbulent era marked by the French Revolution, the First French Empire under Napoleon, the Restoration, the July Revolution and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, the February Revolution, and the Second French Empire. While society as a whole was constantly being turned upside down by wars and revolutions, it was also a period marked by the rapid advancement of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism.
The social customs of Paris during such a colorful and turbulent era are fascinating in their own right. As the bourgeoisie—the middle class—seized power, class contradictions deepened, and money became established as the most important form of social power. Particularly during the July Monarchy, with the rise of “King of the Citizens” Louis-Philippe, everyone—from the king and the nobility to the bourgeoisie, peasants, and even artists—openly pursued wealth and money. Balzac’s literary career was thoroughly intertwined with the atmosphere of this era.
Balzac, the son of a commoner, idolized the nobility and declared himself a royalist—behavior incongruous with his social status—yet he was more eager than anyone else to pursue money. In addition to writing literature, he undertook all manner of business ventures, some shrewd and others foolish, and without a single exception, he failed and was constantly hounded by debt. Living in a house with both a front and a back door—where he had to flee out the back when creditors came calling at the front—he seemed like a vivid illustration of the era in which he lived.
At the time, the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, having made their fortunes suddenly, were obsessed with furnishing their homes with every possible luxury. They imitated the opulent palaces and grand mansions of the nobility, kept servants, and sought to adorn their homes with lavish interior decorations, porcelain, and paintings. However, lacking refined taste and striving for excessive splendor, they were unable to conceal the air of nouveau riche about them.
This general lack of taste among the bourgeoisie is also evident in the extreme in the personal and domestic tastes of Balzac, who was perpetually in debt. Consequently, his life was marked by various amusing anecdotes.
The marriage customs of the time, which prioritized financial stability above all else, are also intriguing. Since it was an era when people would only propose marriage after using every means possible to save a certain amount of money, a significant number of couples had an age difference of 20 or even 30 years. It was rare for couples with different upbringings and a large age gap to share genuine affection, and it was common for both men and women to have lovers.
These chaotic romantic customs are clearly reflected in Balzac’s own life. The women with whom he had relationships were, almost without exception, married women in their 30s and 40s. The back door at Balzac’s house would have been useful not only when he fled from creditors but also when his lovers slipped in and out unnoticed. While his romantic escapades, like so many others of the time, displayed extreme behavior, it is difficult to view them as entirely exceptional phenomena within the social customs of the era.
A Man in Whom Folly and Greatness Coexisted
However, the more one examines Balzac’s life, the more striking it becomes that his life and works are a mixture of greatness and folly. In particular, it seems that folly overwhelmingly prevailed in his actual life. That folly manifests itself in the so-called philistinism—that is, an extreme form of aristocratic worship. And, unsurprisingly, it was a source of unhappiness rather than happiness in his life.
On the other hand, his greatness can be found above all in his literary works. However, even here, one must not jump to conclusions. This is because Balzac was, in many ways, a writer full of contradictions. His novels contain low-quality sentimentality, a style and structure reminiscent of newspaper serializations, plot developments that are at times absurd, extreme hyperbole, and fatal stylistic flaws. Even in his literature, greatness is intertwined with mediocrity.
Balzac’s complete works of fiction were compiled under the title ‘The Human Comedy’. Originally, the plan was to include a total of 137 works, but he actually completed only about 97, of which 74 are full-length novels. Moreover, most of these full-length novels are regarded as highly significant works.
The individual works included in ‘The Human Comedy’ lack a sense of self-contained completeness to the extent that they can be said to almost completely disregard the norms of traditional aesthetics. Of the nearly 2,000 characters, 460 appear repeatedly across multiple works. However, just because a single event in our lives has ended does not mean that life itself ends, nor does it mean that society comes to a halt. Balzac’s countless characters, too, appear not so much as protagonists in the closed worlds of self-contained works of art, but rather as members of an organically interconnected society.
Therefore, rather than viewing Balzac’s works merely as a collection of individual novels, we come to regard the entire “Human Comedy”—a vast social structure connected through complex layers—as a single, monumental social novel.
It is an organized entity forming a network so vast that it cannot be taken in at a single glance. At the same time, it is a literary masterpiece of rare greatness in human history, depicting the history of 19th-century French society. As A. Hauser noted, the secret of Balzac’s art—whose magical influence only grows the more its flaws are exposed—seems to lie precisely here.
The contradiction that, despite harboring countless flaws, leaves one feeling bewildered and powerless, at a loss for words when standing before this great art—that, perhaps, is the very essence of Balzac’s greatness. When one considers the immense labor he poured into creating this monumental work of art, and the intensity of his focus—which even took a toll on his naturally robust health—the inclination to cheerfully mock the various follies that marked his life vanishes in an instant.
The Paradox Revealed by the Work and the Author’s Worldview
Another aspect that makes it difficult to understand Balzac—who has firmly established himself as a pioneer of realist literature—is his reactionary worldview. Although he personally worshipped the aristocracy and identified as a royalist, when he depicted the aristocracy in his literary works, his satire became even sharper and his irony even more scathing.
Although Balzac consistently expressed sympathy for a class destined for decline, his novels depict a society in which a return to the pre-revolutionary state has become entirely impossible. The fact that the author’s personal political beliefs and the world embodied in his literary works could be so diametrically opposed presents a significant paradox in understanding Balzac as a writer.
Balzac has been called a “literary portraitist” who masterfully depicted the diverse character types found across all walks of life in his era. In that sense, Stefan Zweig, author of ‘Zweig’s Biography of Balzac’, also comes across as an outstanding “historical portraitist” who captures the likenesses of figures selected from the context of historical events. Zweig’s literary achievements are particularly notable in the fields of short stories and biographies.
Even before writing this biography of Balzac, Zweig had authored biographies of European writers such as Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. The fact that he, having pursued this work since his youth, chose to write another substantial biography of Balzac as his final work demonstrates that Balzac had long remained a focus of his interest.
In fact, in a letter to Romain Rolland in 1939, Zweig wrote that he had been reading Balzac over and over again for the past 30 years, and that he was repeatedly amazed by his work with each reading. When he passed away in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942, he had left the primary source material for his ‘Biography of Balzac’ and most of the manuscript he had previously written in England, with only the basic outline of the book’s conclusion completed. Ultimately, he was unable to complete the book due to the loss of key materials and portions of the manuscript; the remaining manuscript was published in 1945—three years after Zweig’s death—following a meticulous review and revision by Richard Friedenthal. Thus, the book remains a posthumous work that never underwent Zweig’s own final revisions.
Nevertheless, it seems fair to regard this work as Zweig’s masterpiece as a biographer. Zweig does not simply list the events of Balzac’s life in chronological order. Following his own principles of characterization, he weaves together major events into episodes centered on the depth of experience and the vibrations of the soul, presenting a biographical account—which could easily become heavy—in an engaging manner.
Furthermore, through sharp psychological analysis, he uncovers the psychological motivations that drove Balzac’s inner world, while portraying the mistakes committed by this radical and impulsive man with a keen yet warm and humorous perspective. It is particularly impressive that he does not view Balzac solely as an unquestionably great genius, nor does he focus exclusively on his flaws; instead, he reveals the various contradictions that coexist within him.
How One Writer Understands Another
Most impressive of all is the analysis and evaluation of Balzac’s vast body of work. The author’s concise yet incisive understanding of the works serves as an excellent guide for exploring Balzac’s literary universe.
Because Zweig was a writer himself, he tenaciously traces the creative development of the author he admires. Reading the passages where this master in his sixties—having already perfected his own literary world—revisits the admiration he once held for another writer in his youth gives one the sense that an encounter between the two authors is taking place across time. And that encounter, in turn, transcends time once more to reach me, the reader of this essay.
It is often said that only a genius can understand another genius, but examining how one writer understood another’s creative process is fascinating in and of itself. This is because, through Zweig’s perspective on Balzac, we can glimpse not only Balzac’s works but also the way one writer understands another’s inner world and creative universe.
The brief description of Balzac’s death is lonely and agonizing. Reading that scene, I feel a pain that seems to gnaw at a corner of my heart. And Friedental’s account of the deaths of Zweig and his wife Lotte—who took their own lives in a distant foreign land—stabs at my heart once more.
Yet they were people who, upon their deaths, took their final steps into the hall of immortality. Neither Balzac nor Zweig are with us in this world anymore, but they live on through the works they left behind. What remains in my hands now, after they are gone, is precisely this single book. It feels mysterious that, through a single book, writers who lived in different eras meet, and that this encounter extends all the way to me, the reader.
Zweig: Another “Historical Portraitist”
Zweig was born on November 28, 1881, in Vienna, Austria. He lived in Salzburg from 1919 to 1935, after which he went into exile in London and later in Brazil. He first made a name for himself as a translator of authors such as Verlaine and Baudelaire, and in 1901, he published his first collection of poetry, titled ‘The Silver String’. He became widely known for his historical essays, biographies, and novels, and also left behind ‘The World of Yesterday’, a memoir recounting bygone eras. He passed away in Petrópolis, Brazil, in February 1942.
Zweig is one of the most widely read German-language authors in the world. He has secured such a broad readership that he is known as the most widely read German-language author not only in Europe but also in China.
I believe there are several reasons why he continues to be beloved across regions even today. First, as a biographer, the historical figures he chose are inherently fascinating enough to serve as literary subjects that transcend national boundaries. His biographies deal with figures who found themselves at a crossroads during moments of historical upheaval. Consequently, they serve as excellent introductions not only to the lives of these individuals but also to European culture and history. Furthermore, I feel that among the biographies he left behind, the “Biography of Balzac” is the work into which he poured the most effort, both in terms of quantity and quality.
Zweig’s knack for selecting intriguing subjects stems from his vast knowledge, which pierces to the heart of European history. However, his power to dramatize these subjects comes from his exceptional skill as a writer in structuring his narratives. This compositional skill is once again fully demonstrated in his short stories. As an heir to Europe’s conservative literary tradition, Zweig, an outstanding storyteller, reveals the universal appeal of his works.
Furthermore, when considering Zweig’s international popularity, his writing style cannot be overlooked. Delicate yet powerful, his fluid language—which pours forth like a waterfall, especially when depicting character portraits—initially moves in rhythm with the reader’s breath, only to gradually quicken that pace. Once captivated by the power of Zweig’s language, it is difficult to forget.
Ultimately, Zweig’s appeal seems to lie in his intellect, rich in both breadth and depth; his exceptional skill as a storyteller; and his refined language. Following Balzac’s life and works while simultaneously reading about how Zweig viewed and understood this great writer feels like an experience in which the literary worlds of the two authors meet across time.
