Three Lives

My Three Lives was Stefan Zweig's working title for his memoir The World of Yesterday, also published by Pushkin Press and translated by Anthea Bell. In this definitive biography, Oliver Matuschek uses the title to reference the three major phases in Zweig's life—his years of apprenticeship, his years of success as a professional working writer in Salzburg, and finally his years of exile in Britain, the USA and Brazil. Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, Oliver Matuschek recounts the eventful life of a writer spoilt by success—a life lived in the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide pact. Including the sort of personal detail conspicuously absent from Zweig's memoir, and incorporating newly discovered documents, Matuschek's biography offers us a privileged view into the private world of the master of psychological insight.