Confusion ─ The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D.

Stefan Zweig was particularly drawn to the novella, and Confusion, a rigorous and yet transporting dramatization of the conflict between the heart and the mind, is among his supreme achievements in the form.

A young man who is rapidly going to the dogs in Berlin is packed off by his father to a university in a sleepy provincial town. There a brilliant lecture awakens in him a wild passion for learning—as well as a peculiarly intense fascination with the graying professor who gave the talk. The student grows close to the professor, be-coming a regular visitor to the apartment he shares with his much younger wife. He takes it upon himself to urge his teacher to finish the great work of scholarship that he has been laboring at for years and even offers to help him in any way he can. The professor welcomes the young man’s attentions, at least on some days. On others, he rages without apparent reason or turns away from his disciple with cold scorn. The young man is baffled, wounded. He cannot understand.

But the wife understands. She understands perfectly. And one way or another she will help him to understand too.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novellas Chess Story and Journey Into the Past.

Anthea Bell is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Zweig’s Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

George Prochnik is the author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. He has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Cabinet, among other publications.