Summer Will Show is the third novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner to appear as an NYRB Classic, having been preceded by Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Warner is one of the most inventive, intelligent, and plain astonishing British writers of the twentieth century, fully the equal of such contemporaries of hers as Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, not to mention the slightly older Virginia Woolf. She is an unmistakably modern writer who, however, worked outside the conventions of literary modernism. That should make her particularly attractive to readers and writers of today, and adventurous younger novelists like Ali Smith and Sarah Waters have in fact praised her very highly in recent years.

Summer Will Show is a historical novel set in 1848, that famous disastrous year of revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe. It is the story of Sophia Willoughby, a headstrong and stubborn young aristocrat of—at least to begin with—ironclad Tory conviction. Having made an early marriage to a classic cad, Sophia has hastily borne two children before packing her cheating husband off to Paris and into the arms of his mistress. Now in rural English retreat, she has decided to devote herself to bringing up her children precisely as she was brought up—the only proper way, after all. But then the children die.

What to do? Grief-stricken, Sophia eventually makes her way to Paris, driven by the thought that her husband, whatever his failings, can at least supply her with more children. Paris, however, is in the throes of revolution. Sophia unexpectedly encounters Minna, the despised mistress, and the two women fall in love.

I’m not going to give away more of the plot of this exciting and surprising book, in which nothing is ever quite as it seems. It is an increasingly bloody carnival, a tale of modern metamorphosis to set beside Ovid’s ancient ones, and a book about the ways love remakes and unmakes people, one in which the politics of the heart exist in competition and confusion with politics as usual. It is a disconcerting, even radical book, and its central subject, as in much of Warner’s work, is the inherent strangeness of the self, resistant to control, insusceptible to coercion, demanding one way or another to be discovered and demanding more after that. How to come to terms with this insistent stranger within?

Throughout much of the last century, the historical novel was in very low critical repute; it was daring for Warner to take up this déclassé genre. Recently, however, the genre has had a surprising revival: think of Ragtime, J.G. Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur, or Beloved; of Hilary Mantel’s great novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. What the best of these new historical novels have in common is that they function not as period pieces but as a form of inquiry into history, an inquiry that implicates the present just as much as the past. Summer Will Show looks forward to these books—or they allow us to look back at it and read it with renewed appreciation for Warner’s achievement. In a year of revolution, Warner’s characters are all under the pressure of historical forces they can barely imagine. They feel themselves becoming ever stranger to themselves, ever more weirdly historical, with every step and quarrel and kiss. In 1936, when Summer Will Show was first published, history was of course very much in the air—but then it always is. Warner’s novel awakens us to the ways in which our lives are, as another great writer puts it, “historical, flowing and flown.”

Those words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, and it strikes me now that Warner’s work may remain underestimated for much same the reason that Bishop’s was throughout much of her life. Warner doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She doesn’t make a point of writing about big important subjects in a big important way. (To write a historical novel like Summer Will Show in the 30s was, among other things, very much not to write something like The Waves or For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Though utterly individual, she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last—and though she writes beautifully she is careful never to draw attention to her art.

Her books, however, leave indelible marks. Lolly Willowes, published in 1926, was Warner’s first book and an improbable bestseller. It is the story of a spinster who cuts herself loose from the constraints of respectable family life by becoming a witch and entering into a pact with the Devil. It appears to be a straightforward, though in its day still provocative, feminist parable (call it A Broom of One’s Own), and yet the book takes a mysterious and troubling turn at the end, as the heroine renounces her witchcraft and takes to the road, sleeping out in the open and moving ever farther away from society—as if true freedom could only be had at the cost of a separation from humanity and even life.

Mr. Fortune’s Maggot may be the most perfect (even if perfection doesn’t admit of degrees) book in the NYRB Classics series—an immaculate work, the story of a missionary on a tiny island in the South Seas who falls in love with a young man (again a daring subject for its day) and loses his faith. Timothy Fortune isn’t your stereotypic fictional missionary, all dead dogma and dammed-up desire, but a genuinely good man for whom the discovery of love and the discovery of his utter aloneness come with a shock any of us can share. And yet nothing in Warner’s telling of his tale is melodramatic or sentimental. The “maggot” that sticks out of the book’s title means foible—Warner alluding almost ironically both to Fortune’s falling in love and falling from grace—but it also echoes the names of lute and keyboard fantasies by early English composers like Byrd and Dowland and Gibbons. These dance-inspired pieces, with titles such as “Lord Salisbury’s Pavan” and “Hugh Aston’s Ground,” are both stately and melancholy, brooding and quirky, light and dark—precisely the qualities of the book itself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a woman of extraordinary achievement—not only a marvelous novelist and writer of stories but a very fine poet and a notable musicologist to boot. Summer Will Show is perhaps her most out-and-out exciting book, but Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot are equally good places to start exploring the work of a wonderful writer who seems all the more central because she stands so beautifully apart.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

There are certain writers who feature in a large way in the NYRB Classics series—some, like Simenon and Victor Serge, I’ve written about in the past; others, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, perhaps the most purely original of modern English storytellers, I mean to. Here I want to say a little bit about Andrey Platonov, whose Soul and Other Stories we published last year and whose great and harrowing novel The Foundation Pit we have just put out in a striking new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, the first translation of the book in English to be based on the recently established definitive Russian text.

As a plaudit, “recently established definitive Russian text” may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. He is the twentieth century Russian novelist who, more than any other (more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn, more even than Bulgakov), Russians will tell you has added to and transformed the great tradition of Russian literature. Russians may also tell you that if you are one of those unfortunates who doesn’t read Russian, just how great Platonov is you’ll never know. I’m one of those unfortunates, I confess, but then I’m confident that, as a rule—a rule to which Platonov is no exception—great literature translates. I first encountered this extraordinary writer’s work in an old and uncertain translation based on a censored text, a book given to me by a friend of my father’s who I later learned was an agent for the CIA. Even so, I knew I was hearing a voice as distinct and powerful as any to emerge in the twentieth century, a writer who not only reflected the unimaginable realities of modern history, but actively shifted reality, staggering us, making us see the world in a strange and disorienting new light. At last, with this new translation, the greatness of Platonov, the difference that he makes, become unmistakable for readers of English.

Platonov was born into a working-class family in 1899 and grew up with the Russian Revolution, which he initially embraced with enthusiasm and never disavowed. For better or for worse, Platonov’s world is the world after the Revolution, with which a new reality begins. Platonov, however, is hardly a conventionally realistic writer, since the nature of the post-Revolutionary world is that history has ended and reality has been upended, replaced by a heady brew of utopian anticipations and nightmarish premonitions. This is the paradoxical regime of progress—appearing no doubt in an extreme form under Communism, but common to all modern societies—under which everything is understood to exist on the condition that it is to be replaced by something better, and so may be judged as already obsolescent; a bipolar world in which exterior and internal realities become weirdly intermixed and people seesaw between irrational exuberance (it wasn’t a Communist who coined that phrase) and boundless melancholy. In The Foundation Pit a character feels himself “hurtling forwards into the distance of history, towards the summit of universal and unprecedented times.” Another remarks dolefully, “Everybody dies of life. In the end there’s just bones.”

Written in the early thirties, The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most direct reckoning with Revolutionary terror. The novel describes the devastation caused in the late 1920s by Stalin’s twin policies of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—a Revolution from Above that was no less important and traumatic than the Revolution of 1917. The story begins when Voshchev, a classic Chekhovian luftmensch, is fired from his job for excessive “thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.” Voshchev wanders out into the country where he happens upon a group of workers engaged in constructing a grand new All-Proletarian Home, a title which is meant entirely literally. Among them is Zhachev, a bitter, irascible, scabrous, mutilated veteran, who hauls himself around on a little cart, a freak, in his own words. Also there is Chiklin, the hardworking single-minded earnest proletarian, determined to get things right, though not entirely sure what that means. Voshchev joins this oddly assorted group which soon adopts an orphan girl in whom they place all their hopes for the future. Nastya is a strange waif:

“Now who might you be, my little girl?” asked Safronov [a Revolutionary zealot]. “What did your dear mama and papa do?”

“I’m nobody,” said the little girl.

“How can you be nobody? Some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?”

“But I didn’t want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois…. When only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn’t be born, because I didn’t want to be born. But now that Stalin’s become, I’ve become too!”

Soon it becomes clear that the task of digging the pit is unending—almost by definition, since it must accommodate the whole (no pun intended) of the future: the pit is a inverted tower of Babel or, as it eventually turns out, an immense grave. Because after the mysterious death of the zealot Safronov, digging the pit takes second place to making sure that construction will not be sabotaged by “counter-revolutionary elements.” The peasantry in particular must be purified. But purification also turns out to be an unending task, and in an extraordinary scene, at once savagely satirical and disconcertingly moving, in the midst of a simultaneous blizzard of snow and flies, pro-revolutionary workers and condemned peasants, doomed to die, gather in the yard of a collective farm as in a church to kiss and forgive each other:

“All right now, comrades?” asked Chiklin.

“Yes,” came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. “Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us.”

Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.

“Greetings!” he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. Now you’ve become like me. I’m nothing too.”

“Greetings!” The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man….

All that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.

I mentioned the Tower of Babel above, and as even these brief excerpts from The Foundation Pit must suggest, there is no discussing the book without considering its strange language, a mixture of political groupspeak, biblical allusion, slapstick, and bereft lyricism, a kind of language of unlikeness. It is a made-up language and a traumatized one—made dead, you could say. It is at once the babble of infancy, the lying cant of corruption, an outcry of desperation, and the voice, against all odds, of hope. Part of the fascination of the work is that the reader is perpetually unsure which register it is pitched in.

Platonov, as much as Beckett and Kafka, is a major writer of the twentieth century and, like them, he is a writer in extremis. Kafka’s statement that “hope is infinite, but not for us” might come from Platonov. These are all writers who in different ways recognize the terror, tedium, and sheer contingency of the modern world. And yet in the later stories collected in Soul, Platonov shows us something else, something more in tune with Chekhov: people trying to rescue from the flux of life and the disaster of history some memorable and sustaining moment of true feeling. In “The Return,” a story beloved by the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald, a man returns from World War II to wife and family and—and almost leaves. The art of the story is to capture in that prolonged moment of hesitation the entirety of life. And in the nightmarish world of The Foundation Pit, too, a similar tenderness, however bare-knuckled, can be discerned. As Zhachev remarks, “It’s best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!”

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Everything’s up in the air at the start of Theodor Storm’s novella, The Rider on the White Horse, written in 1888 when Storm, who was not only a celebrated author but also a distinguished jurist, was on his deathbed. The story begins—begins almost reluctantly—with a strange confusion of voices. First we hear what we take to be the author—only he disclaims authorship. He tells us that we are about to read a story that he read maybe a half century ago in a magazine, a magazine that in the years since he has never been able to track down, a story, he somewhat puzzlingly adds, of which “nothing external” has ever reminded him. The story follows: its narrator, traveling along the coast of the North Sea, is caught in a terrible storm; battered by wind and waves, he repeatedly glimpses a spectral horseman galloping furiously and soundlessly past him. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and now the local schoolmaster steps in. It is he who tells what you might call the story proper—a ghost story, yes, but also, as these overlapping voices might suggest, a story that has a ghostly life of its own.

At first, however, there is nothing uncanny about the story the schoolmaster tells, about a young man making his way in the world sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hauke Heien is a boy from a modest farming background who, with a talent for numbers and a fascination with the ways of water, apprentices himself to the local dikemaster and soon makes himself indispensable. When the dikemaster dies, his mantle falls upon Hauke, who also marries, very happily, his daughter. It is a success story.

Hauke’s story is set, as I mentioned, on the edge of the North Sea, in Frisia, where the proper construction and maintenance of dikes is crucial not only to the safety but also to the well-being of the community: as the network of dikes expands, so does the availability of land for grazing or cultivation. To open new fields, Hauke orders the construction of a new dike, built on new principles. Content with things as they are, the villagers grumble about the project. The dikemaster, however, is not lightly disobeyed, and they undertake it. They are—and this is where the story begins to grow unsettling—truly horrified when, after two years, the work approaches conclusion, and the dikemaster intervenes to prevent a step without which it will all have been in vain. “Something living has got to go into it,” one man tells Hauke, “Even our grandfathers knew that much….”

Hauke ordains that no sacrifice will take place. The dike is built and holds. The new land is cleared. Reason trumps superstition. Progress is made. So it appears, and yet Hauke remains a lonely figure, with only wife and child for company, distrusted by the larger community. He has done his job, neglecting nothing, except perhaps something about the human. He rides on his white horse along his dike and feels himself to be “at the center of all the Frisians alive and dead….[towering] above them all.”

There is an extraordinary moment in The Rider on the White Horse when Hauke’s wife is sick, and Hauke, unusually, prays:

O God, don’t take her away from me! I can’t do without her and You know it!… I know You can’t always do just what You want to do—not even You…. Speak to me! Just a breath!

Silence. A silence that is at the heart of Storm’s story, where the natural world is prowled by supernatural apparitions, while the supernatural itself, the divine—even the poignantly limited God, able only to help a bit, that Hauke addresses—never appears. A world in which you cannot trust your eyes or anything, much less—Hauke will discover—know yourself.

I’m not going to reveal the end—you’ll want to find it out yourself, I hope—and ruin the suspense, which mounts powerfully as the story proceeds. I will say that by the end we have been returned, in richer and stranger ways than we might have ever imagined, to the beginning: we are up in the air again. I began by noting the author’s odd disclaimer about “nothing external” having ever reminded him of the story he happened upon long ago and now intends to tell again, and one thing that becomes clear in the course of that telling is that the landscape of the story is an interior landscape—the landscape of conscience, say, where the real and the unreal exist under continual threat of confusion, kept apart by only the most fragile and provisional barriers—though Storm’s mud slicks, icy marshes, fog banks, crashing waves, and vulnerable dikes, not to mention Hauke and the villagers, never strike us as anything but unforgettably real.

And as to what I also mentioned to begin with, the strangely layered voices by which the story is relayed, by the end it is clear, I think, that the story we have heard is essentially choral: the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, as I said, was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, the reader is brought up short by his own apparition. The reader is the ghost.

The Rider on the White Horse is the title story and masterpiece in a selection of Storm’s novellas and stories translated by the very fine American poet James Wright for the Signet Classics series, when it was edited by E.L. Doctorow. If I see a book from that series that I haven’t read, I always pick it up, and in this case I was especially interested because of Wright’s involvement. I’d always meant to read Storm, though more as a matter of duty, I suppose, than anticipated delight. It’s not often that one starts a long story, finds oneself pulled irresistibly along through it, and finishes it both astonished and convinced that it is, in the strongest sense of the word, great—a work that will deepen with rereading, that matters. That was my experience with The Rider on the White Horse.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Pinocchio has long been one of my favorite books, so I was overjoyed when, a few years back, Geoffrey Brock, the poet and translator of Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and Cesare Pavese, wrote me saying that if I was in the business of bringing neglected books back to light, why didn’t I consider Pinocchio, a very great book, as all Italians knew, but so taken for granted and, in English, so haphazardly translated, that it had hardly received its due. Brock was eager to translate the book, he said—it would be a labor of love—and I was eager to publish the translation. Here then, a few years down the line, is a beautifully clear and compelling new rendering of Pinocchio, in which this sly, savage, mystifying, funny, poignant, endlessly surprising work of art shines in all its prismatic glory.

It’s an event. For much too long poor Pinocchio has lived in the shadow of Pinocchio the movie star and Pinocchio the ubiquitous tchotchke, characters who have gotten in the way of his telling his own story. In my own case, certainly, Pinocchio‘s Disneyfication acted as a deterrent to reading the actual book. It was around the house in my childhood, but by the time I was old enough to read it I wouldn’t go near it because I already knew all about its bubbly hero who was, for all his scapegrace pretensions, at heart nothing more than an aspiring priss. I was utterly wrong, of course, and sometimes I wish that I had had a chance to get to know Pinocchio earlier, but then again perhaps not doing so was a lucky break. Because when, sometime well into adolescence, on an actual or metaphorical rainy day I picked up the book and read it, it was a revelation.

Pinocchio is a book of fulgurating strangeness, unpredictable from start to finish. As Umberto Eco points out in his introduction to Brock’s translation, Collodi is busy up-ending expectations from the book’s very first lines:

Once upon a time there was….
“A King!” my little readers will say at once.
No children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a block of wood.

The scene that follows is not only unsettling but positively spooky. A carpenter is using his hatchet to trim that piece of wood into a table leg—when, out of nowhere, a not so still small voice cries out: “You’re hurting me!” Pinocchio (who thus oddly exists before he comes into existence) stuns and terrifies the carpenter, known, because of his red and presumably alcoholic nose, as Master Cherry. Master Cherry wonders whether he isn’t just hearing things, and for a moment we wonder too. Throughout the book, a book in which “being real” is a question of paramount importance, Collodi leads us to doubt the reality at hand. Perhaps all this is nothing more than a drunken carpenter’s imaginings? Who knows? But what it is unquestionably is the beginning of a story, and once started the story will have its way.

A wayward way, in the course of which Pinocchio repeatedly runs up against the great non-negotiable realities of the fallen world—work, poverty, pain, evil—even as he is relentlessy propelled forward by the equally imperative freaks and fancies of his unbounded desire. Pinocchio wants what he wants and he wants it now: food, drink, money, fun. Collodi takes him through Chumptrap and the Land of Gulls and other locations posted with big allegorical warning signs, but it is in the nature of Pinocchio—it is his genius—never to get the message. When the Talking Cricket keeps up his shrill repetitive admonitions, Pinocchio simply kills him.

Pinocchio’s world is haunted by poverty—he tells the forbidding puppet master Fire-Eater that Gepetto’s trade is “being poor”—and even more so by violence and death. Gepetto is sure his beloved Pinocchio has died; Pinocchio no less certain that his daddy has. The Fairy with Sky-Blue Hair first appears in the story as a girl in the door of a small white house into which Pinocchio, pursued by murderers, begs to be let in—impossible, she calmly explains, she is dead. Pinocchio himself, captured by his assailants, is then hanged from a tree. The next day, the Fairy, now remarkably alive and adult, has him taken down and tended to. She consults two doctors, a crow and an owl, to determine whether the puppet is dead or alive:

The Crow stepped forward first…., “It is my opinion that the puppet is quite dead. But if by some chance he is not dead, then that would be a sure sign that he is still alive.”
“I regret,” said the Owl, “that I must contradict my illustrious friend and colleague, the Crow. I believe rather that the puppet is still alive. But if by some chance he is still not alive, that would indicate that he is in fact dead.”

The puppet is of course neither alive nor dead, but a fiction, suspended (as marionettes characteristically are) between those states. Pinocchio, a book as mysteriously matter-of-fact as an early morning dream, is a brilliant evocation of the promise and precariousness of childhood, when the world is both new and immemorial and everything is possible and yet, because one is a child, nothing is. For that matter, it could be said to be a book about the promise and precariousness of consciousness itself, displaced as we are between our own unfathomable desires and imaginings and the ultimately unimaginable reality of the world at large.

The ultimate reality, however, is that the story, like all stories—like everything—must come to an end: Pinocchio must become a real boy, e basta! A puppet’s life is too uncertain to go on forever, and real life can only go on outside the book.

Pinocchio is a book of deep intelligence and pure inspiration, a beautiful work that seems, like its hero, almost to have willed itself into existence. (Collodi, though an accomplished man, never accomplished anything remotely equivalent, and in Pinocchio he amusingly depicts a gang of boys bombarding each other with his books). On the cover of this edition is an image from an installation by the artist Tim Rollins and K.O.S., a collective of high school students with whom Rollins works. They read Pinocchio and in response put on a show that, at first sight, consisted of nothing but logs, some scattered on the gallery floor, some propped up against the wall. Viewed at close range, however, each log turned out to contain a pair of wide-open, staring eyes, a tireless avid unblinking spirit confronting the world. It’s a great image of Pinocchio, I think, and a great image, too, of what it means to encounter a great book, also a thing made out of wood with the presence and power of a living thing: it fastens its eyes upon you; it transfixes you with its gaze.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

I wanted to follow up my recent note about Stefan Zweig and The Post-Office Girl with a few words about Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, written around the same time as Zweig’s novel. Leonard Wolf’s wonderful translation from the original Yiddish came out some twenty years ago, but the NYRB Classics edition marks the first time this unclassifiable masterpiece—a message in a bottle from another world, or even, you might at times feel tempted to say, the otherworld—has appeared in paperback.

Der Nister and Stefan Zweig were contemporaries, but the two writers’ worlds were worlds apart, though both were to be destroyed. Der Nister, which means “the hidden one,” was the pen name of Pinhas Kahanovitch, who grew up in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, a city of nearly half-a-million people, most of them Jews, that in the nineteenth century was famous both as a center of Russian finance and of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalistic fables were among the sources of Der Nister’s early short stories, which came out during the 1910s and ‘20s, and which bear a certain resemblance to the paintings of his good friend Marc Chagall. (You might also describe these stories as magical realist, and it is striking that quite a number of turn-of-century works of literature from regions that, like García Márquez’s Colombia, existed at a remove from the major centers of cultural and political power have a magical realist air: the piquant stew of the mythic and the erotic and the satirical that is Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflower, from 1918, comes to mind.) In any case, though some of the mysticism of Der Nister’s early work also makes its way into The Family Mashber, here it is worked like an iridescent thread into the fabric of a fully realistic novel, one in which the conflicting communities of nineteenth-century Berdichev—Polish nobles, Russian imperial officials, and above all the tightly knit, but also deeply divided, Jewish community, its businessmen, rabbis, unbelievers, timeservers, loansharks, hitmen, and holy fools—all come spectacularly alive.

But The Family Mashber is not just a brilliant depiction of a vanished world. It is a major modern novel, and what makes it so is the utterly original voice that Der Nister gives to its narrator. It is a voice out of the oral tradition, that of a storyteller, pulling his stories together (pulling them out of a hat), stepping back to see how they look, disclaiming knowledge of some details, picking up almost arbitrarily on others, a voice that is variously confiding, contradictory, cajoling, insinuating, prickly, probing, and hypnotic. Sometimes the voice seems medieval—which is to say almost naively digressive—sometimes as supremely self-conscious as that of the highest of high modernists. It becomes, in any case, a living presence on the pages of the book, a vagrant solitary voice, endlessly inquisitive, consistently skeptical of received wisdom, but at the same time a collective one in which the town’s many different voices are blended as in a chorus. (This equivocal voice is in a sense incarnated in one of the most remarkable figures in The Family Mashber, Sruli Gol, an outcast, beggar, and scamp who is secretly fantastically rich and manages somehow to be completely in the know about everything that is going on in the world of the novel.) In the end, the voice of Der Nister’s narrator is the voice of someone making it up as he goes along, while also, like Scheherezade, holding destruction at bay, a voice for which storytelling becomes a way of forever delaying an inevitable end.

The first volume of The Family Mashber was published in the Soviet Union in 1939, and volumes one and two, which tell the story of the downfall of the businessman Moshe Mashber, came out in Yiddish in the United States in 1948. After the Second World War, Der Nister was arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to the Gulag, where he died. He is supposed to have completed the third volume of The Family Mashber before his arrest. Perhaps, like The Post-Office Girl, it will someday come to light.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

June is the month of Reading the World, a program in which publishers and independent booksellers team up to promote literature in translation throughout the country. NYRB is a happy participant in Reading the World, and this letter gives me a chance both to plug the whole endeavor and to write about Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, one of two NYRB Reading the World selections. (The other is Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years.) Thanks to translator Joel Rotenberg, The Post-Office Girl is at last available in English. It’s no less striking than Beware of Pity and Chess Story, the two other Zweigs we’ve published, but it couldn’t be more different. It’s a book that should change how people think about Stefan Zweig.

The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It’s the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It’s a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it’s really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria’s defeat in 1918, Zweig’s novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature. Christine and Ferdinand and Austria have been hollowed out (even if the country is still decked out in the pomp, circumstance, and pointless bureaucratic regulations of its bygone imperial heyday). They exist in a Hobbesian state of terminal desperation from which—the discovery arrives with mounting horror and excitement—the only hope of escape or redemption lies in violence.

Zweig wrote The Post-Office Girl in the early 1930s, working on it during years that Hitler rose to power and that saw Zweig, as a Jew, forced into exile. He appears to have considered the book finished, and yet he left it untitled and made no effort to publish. Why? My own hunch is that it was just too close to the bone. Zweig was famous all over the world as a writer of fiction and non-fiction and as a public intellectual. He was, you could say, the standard bearer for a certain liberal ideal of civilization, for a way of life that is worldly, compassionate, cultivated, tolerant, sensitive, self-aware, and reflexively touched with irony; the life of, as he considered himself, a man of taste and judgment. In the face of Nazism, such an ideal may have come to seem so much wishful thinking, and certainly Zweig, in exile, found his whole reason for living undercut. This, it seems to me, is the trauma that The Post-Office Girl registers. It accounts for the raw power and relentlessness of the book, for its difference from his other work, and also, I imagine, for Zweig’s uneasiness about it. He couldn’t put it or the reality it describes in perspective. I don’t think that it’s an accident that The Post-Office Girl, though finished in the mid-30s, finds Zweig rehearsing a scenario for suicide that clearly anticipates his and his wife’s deaths in Brazil in 1942.

Found among Zweig’s papers after his death, The Post-Office Girl did not appear in German until 1982, when it was published as Rausch der Verwandlung (a phrase taken from a crucial early episode in the novel, translatable as “the intoxication of metamorphosis”). Zweig’s letters refer to his “post-office girl book,” and we have chosen to follow this lead. An equally good title, also true to the book, it strikes me now, would have been “State of Shock.”

In two weeks I’ll be writing again—about Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, a masterpiece of Yiddish literature.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics