Confusion Author:Stefan Zweig In Stefan Zweig?s Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching — the end of his career adds a ?secret page? to the — public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true — story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils — of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more — devoted to amorous adventures with local ... more »shop girls than
books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in
central Germany where a professor?s brilliant lecturing style
sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading.
He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and
his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them
on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to
make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet
the professor?s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates
with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed
student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection,
feelings only the professor?s frustrated young wife seems to
understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man?s
apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out. . .
Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts
and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge,
muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity,
Zweig?s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative