?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
INCLUDES STATEMENT ON DOSTOEVSKY AND TOLSTOY: "THEY ARE LIKE TWO HUGE MOUNTAINS" ZWEIG, STEFAN. Three items, each Signed, to editor William Kozlenko: Typed Letter * Autograph Letter * Typescript. The first, in German, explaining that he is engaged in a large project and cannot write anything new, and sending his portrait of Albert Schweitzer [not present]. 1 page, oblong 8vo, personal stationery; vertical fold. The second, agreeing to send a short story or essay with American interest, and sending an essay on the correspondence between Romain Rolland and Malwida von Meysenbug [not present]. 1 1/4 pages, oblong 8vo, personal stationery, written on the recto and verso of a single sheet; vertical fold. The third, a statement about the importance of Fyodor Dostoevsky as compared with Leo Tolstoy, in German. With a few holograph corrections, and an autograph note, "For your question / about Dostoyewsky," in English, written at lower left. 1 page, tall 4to; folds. Salzburg, 2 January; 24 October 1932; Np, nd
The typescript: "I read Dostoevsky again and again and always with the same admiration. Because his psychology and political forebodings were so ahead of his time, he is today more topical than ever; his characters are as permanent as that of any great poet, even Shakespeare and Balzac; those who imitated him could never achieve this aspect of his creative power, because his emotional intensity remains incomparable. "The fact that the other Russian giant, Tolstoy, stands gigantic next to him, must not diminish the appreciation of his size; one does not obscure the other. They are like two huge mountains, each in a different shape and from a different geological stratification. The height of one is the best way to recognize the magnificence of the other. They complement each other like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, like Goethe and Schiller, like Shelley and Keats, and their simultaneity in the same hour and nation created one of the great moments in the history of thought."
