THE THREE GREAT MASTERS – STEFAN ZWEIG

avukatahmetozdemir
Dec 28, 2025
10 min read

MY COMMENTS :

This work, written by author Stefan Zweig, presents literary portraits of three great writers—Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky—along with anecdotes about their lives.

The author, who dedicated separate sections to each of the three writers, devoted as much space to Dostoevsky as he did to Dickens and Balzac combined. This clearly shows his particular admiration for Dostoevsky, a fact he explicitly acknowledges in the final section of his quotations.

Since I have detailed the important anecdotes and thoughts of all three authors in the quotations section, I think it is appropriate here to limit myself to mentioning aspects that the author did not discuss or directly address.

As is clearly evident from the work, all great artists have written works that virtually represent the conditions of their society and country at that time. This is, naturally, normal for all of us. However, it can be said that truly great writers are those who best reflect these periods and the portraits of their people to their readers, and therefore deserve the title of "best writers." Especially during Balzac's time, when France had an emperor with expansionist policies, it is explicitly stated that the author wrote about this issue.

Considering that England was one of the most comfortable countries in the 19th century during Dickens's time, it's clear that the characters had ordinary, everyday needs and demands related to prosperity. However, the real achievement isn't simply being able to produce books for that era, but rather being able to develop these characters in a way that deeply affects the reader. This is precisely what distinguishes great writers from others.

If I were to talk about Dostoevsky in the same way the author did, if someone wanted to develop a reading habit and asked me to recommend an impressive classic, I think I would first suggest Crime and Punishment. Although it may seem cliché, this book is one of the best reasons why classics are remembered in this way. Because it was among the first classics I read, it made me feel uneasy after a while. Seeing that other classics also possessed this quality and impact made me question myself, and I thought I was very lucky if all classics could transport the reader to other worlds with this style and narrative. However, I soon realized that this was Dostoevsky's illusion.

As with great thinkers, in Dostoevsky's work everything gains meaning through its opposite. It's a well-known fact that his characters, in some respects, directly reflect the author himself. He also very effectively demonstrates the situations humanity can find itself in when it becomes dependent on universal impulses. Some characters behave so well that, after a while, their excessive naivety can even harm others. Therefore, the value of good is embodied through evil, and the value of beauty through ugliness.

In conclusion, this is a Zweig book that readers of all ages should read, as it contains important messages from which they can learn.

MY QUOTATIONS(*) :

Balzac depicts the world of society, Dickens the world of the family, and Dostoevsky the world of the individual and humanity. When Balzac became dissatisfied with his success and unfulfilled by his work, he set aside art, spent three or four years pursuing other professions; he worked as a clerk in a notary's office, observed, looked, learned, and penetrated the world with his perspective, and then he began to write once more.
Conquering the world was Balzac's youthful dream, and nothing is more magnificent than a childhood dream come true. Under a painting of Napoleon, he wrote, " What he could not finish with the sword, I will finish with the pen ."
Balzac's characters are driven by ambition; they want everything completely.
To attain power, one must either find their own unique method or learn the methods of others, of society.
Intensity, will, is everything, for it belongs to man, whereas success and fame belong to nothing, for they are determined by chance. But it was the persistence, firmness, and absoluteness of madness that enabled this one-sided obsession to reach perfection; its work is no longer sweat, but only fire, ecstasy (religious intoxication), imagination, and passion.
His life consisted of passionately participating in the tastes of the people he created.
A writer should stay away from women; they waste his time. One should limit himself to writing about them; this strengthens his style.
Balzac possessed encyclopedic knowledge; he knew the value of a painting of Palma Vecchio, the price of a hectare of pasture, the cost of lace, a carriage, a servant, and he understood the life of the upper class, who, despite being deeply in debt, spent twenty thousand francs a year. Two pages later, we see the impoverished life of a retiree, for whom a broken window or a torn umbrella becomes a catastrophe. (It was known that he had debts exceeding 100,000 francs at the time of his death.)
What others can only see in a veiled way, under thousands of disguises, he can see as if naked and clear.
The idea of viewing the novel as an encyclopedia of the world begins with him – and it could almost be said that it ended with him if Dostoevsky hadn't come along.
Balzac once said, “ A genius is someone who can put their thoughts into action at any moment. But a truly great genius does not pursue this action relentlessly, otherwise they would be too much like God .” ( End of Balzac Chapter )
When Dickens decided to read his works aloud to the public, making his first face-to-face encounter with his readers, England was shaken. In the United States, people were sleeping on mattresses laid out in front of ticket booths during the coldest winters, and a church in Brooklyn was transformed into a reading room for the author. Dickens himself ascended the pulpit and read the adventures of Oliver Twist and the story of little Nell.
A literary work can only achieve such a vast, widespread, and profound impact when two seemingly contradictory elements rarely come together: a genius identified with the tradition of their own time.
Every Englishman is more English than a German is. Englishness is not a veneer, a paint on the mental organism of a person; it mixes with the blood, regulates its rhythm, and animates the most intimate, inner, and fundamental aspects of the individual: this is the artistic aspect. As an artist, an Englishman is more devoted to his race than a German or a Frenchman.
Just as Shakespeare embodies the audacity of ambitious England, Dickens embodies the prudence of complacent England. Dickens was born in 1812. When he opened his eyes, the world was dark, the great fire that threatened the foundations of European states had been extinguished. At Waterloo, Napoleon's guards had been scattered by the English infantry, England was free, and from a distant island, it watched the demise of its eternal enemy, powerless and uncrowned, all alone.
In England at that time, happiness was equated with leisurely strolling, aesthetic refinement with virtue, national sentiment with loyalty, and love with marriage. All vital values were suffering from anemia; England was content with its lot and did not want change.
At that time – in 1848 – England was the only country in Europe that had not undergone a revolution; similarly, it wanted only to correct and improve, not to overthrow and recreate things.
Dostoevsky's characters are also fiery and passionate, their wills defy the world, and they reach from real life to true life in the most immense insatiability; they do not want to be citizens or human beings. Balzac's character wants to subjugate the world, Dostoevsky's wants to conquer it. Dickens' characters are all humble. Their ideal is a common bourgeois ideal.
Dickens' books are true novels in the sense of richness and constant movement, not like the psychological novels we Germans all write, which are almost endlessly drawn out.
Dickens always emphasizes the characteristic traits of his characters, taking them out of the realm of objectivity and exaggerating and caricaturing them.
His heroes are always either extraordinarily exceptional or wretched and base, characters whose fates are predetermined; they bear either sacred halos or burn marks on their foreheads, and his world oscillates between good and evil, between the sensitive and the emotionless.
English lies emasculate (castrate) the lust in man and subjugate the adult, but children still live their senses in a paradisiacal indifference; they are not yet English, but rather merely small, bright human flowers, their colorful worlds not yet obscured by the mist of English hypocrisy.
Balzac empowered the bourgeoisie with his hatred, Dostoevsky did so with his messianic love, and Dickens, as an artist, freed these people from their heavy worldly burdens through his humor.
Like all Englishmen, Dickens smiles only with his lips, not his whole body. ( End of Dickens Chapter )
From the dense fog of these days, something slowly begins to take shape, and finally, from this misty, dreamlike state, a mixture of fear and ecstasy, his first artistic work matures: his short novel, *The Little People*. His greatest shame, poverty, produced it; his greatest strength, his love of suffering, sanctified his boundless compassion.
In Dostoevsky's life, the beginning is often melodrama, but the end always turns into tragedy.
Every rise is followed by a fall, and this fleeting blessing is paid for with many desperate hours and sorrows that occur within the mechanism.
Memoirs from the House of the Dead, an immortal account of a condemnation, pulled Russia out of the lethargy of passively observing. The flames of accusation rose to the Kremlin, the Tsar wept while reading the book, and thousands of lips whispered Dostoevsky's name.
Turgenev and Tolstoy have been overshadowed. Russia now looks only to him. A Writer's Diary transforms him into the messiah of his nation, and gathering his last strength, he reaches the pinnacle of his art and completes his testament to the future of his nation: The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky said, " There is no feeling more necessary for humankind than being able to bow before eternity. "
Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy throughout his thirty-year career as an artist. In the middle of writing, on the street, during conversations, even in his sleep, the grip of nightmares would tighten around his throat, throwing him around so violently that he would crash to the ground with foam at the mouth, his unprepared body covered in blood.
Tolstoy's life is didactic, a school textbook, a pamphlet; Dostoevsky's is a work of art, a tragedy, a destiny. Tolstoy has condemned himself for all his mortal sins, loudly and in front of the whole society. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, is silent, but his silence speaks more of Sodom than all of Tolstoy's accusations. Dostoevsky does not want to judge himself, change himself, or improve himself; he wants only one thing: to empower himself.
Dostoevsky's characters are real Russians, people of transition, with the chaos of the beginning in their hearts, laden with timidity and unease. They are constantly hesitant and fearful, constantly feeling humiliated and scorned, and all this stems from a single fundamental feeling of the nation: their ignorance of who they are. None of them possesses a traditional stance, the crutches of an inherited worldview. They are all immoderate and helpless in an unknown world.
All of them (Dostoevsky's characters) love to suffer because in suffering they feel life and love more intensely, because they know that " in this world, one can only truly love through suffering, " and that's what they want, more than anything! This is their strongest proof of existence.
In Dostoevsky's work, man struggles for the ultimate truth, for his self which is universal humanity. Whether he commits a murder or burns with love for a woman, all these are insignificant, external matters, background. His novels take place in the innermost parts of man, in the spiritual realm, in the mental world.
Dostoyevsky is the psychologist of psychologists. The depths of the human heart magically draw him in; the unconscious, the subconscious, the incomprehensible is his true world.
Dostoevsky delved deeper into the underworld of the unconscious than doctors, lawyers, criminologists, and psychopaths. He was able to foresee, long before science discovered and named them—things extracted from seemingly dead experiences through experiments—all these telepathic, hysterical, delusional, and perverse phenomena, thanks to his prophetic intimacy and mystical capacity for shared suffering. He traced the phenomena of the soul to the limits of madness (mental excess) and the abyss of crime (emotional excess), thus traversing the endless paths of this new spiritual realm from one end to the other.
Dostoevsky's characters don't want to love as much as they are loved: they only want to love and be sacrificed, always wanting to give more and receive less, and they wildly escalate their emotions until what begins as a gentle game becomes a suffocation, a groan, a struggle, an agony.
This is Dostoevsky's secret: He needs God, but he cannot find Him. Sometimes he thinks he belongs to Him and is seized by ecstasy, only to be thrown back down to earth by the need for denial. No one has felt the need for God more intensely than him. " God is necessary for me for this reason ," he once said, " because He is the only being that a person can always love. "
Dostoevsky said, " To comprehend the existence of God and at the same time to comprehend that man is not God would be an absurdity that would lead a person to suicide ."
Those who know best are those who suffer most, and whoever knows you must bless you: And this man, who understands you most deeply, behold, has testified to you more than anyone else, and loved you more than anyone else. ( End of Dostoevsky Chapter )

MY ASSESSMENTS:

Subject : The work features literary portraits of three great writers—Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky—along with anecdotes about their lives.

Style: As in Zweig's other books, this work also employs a style characterized by short and clear sentence structures. However, in some sections, particularly the one concerning Dostoevsky, it is evident that the sentence structure incorporates examples from Dostoevsky's writing.

Originality : The work will not be evaluated in this category due to its nature.

Character : The work, by its nature, will not be evaluated in this category.

Fluency : Considering the points mentioned in the style section, it must be stated that the work is written with a fluent narrative from beginning to end. However, it should be noted that it does not possess the element of suspense due to its subject matter. Nevertheless, given the genre and subject matter of the work, it is evident that the suspense expected from a fictional novel is not the main issue in this work.

Overall : Based on the criteria mentioned above, and evaluated out of 10:

Subject: 8.5

Style: 8

Fluency: 8

The overall average score for the work, which received its rating, is 8.2 . As the score indicates, the work contains a significant author portrait from which people of all ages can find something relatable and draw important conclusions. Therefore, it is clearly a must-read.

(*) : All parts under the heading "Quotations":

THE THREE GREAT MASTERS

Author : Stefan Zweig

Publisher : Türkiye İş Bankası Cultural Publications

Edition : 25th Edition - January 2021

The quote used on the cover is taken from the book in the photograph.

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