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A contribution to: Rewriting(s)

Edited by Lucy Russell and Eleanor Dobson

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 11

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This article ties together two of Stefan Zweig’s (1881–1942) principal creative enterprises — the collection of autograph manu­scripts and the writing of biographies — and positions him as a significant figure in the developing appreciation of ‘rewriting’. Zweig’s collection included working drafts and corrected proofs from many great writers, but central among these was Honoré de Balzac, who is pivotal to both the nineteenth century’s turn towards authors’ compositional traces and the more modern practice of genetic criticism. Focusing partly on Balzac’s bound proofs of the novel Une ténébreuse affaire, an early part of Zweig’s collection, a conflicting, or perhaps hybrid, conception of creativity can be drawn out. On the cusp of material and textual criticism, yet fixed to a Romantic admiration of the author figure, Zweig’s thought represents an interesting negotiation of authorship. His process of writing biography sheds further light on his conception of a creator. Zweig revises his early drafts of Balzac to maximise the personal struggle of the protagonist at the expense of contingent factors to creativity. Simultaneously reductive and personal, Zweig’s empathetic mode of biography, so often condemned, might also be seen to have a moral foundation in its focus on human exceptionality.

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