Neimari svijeta

Although the three trilogies in this volume were written during a period of twenty-five years, all were, from the very first, parts of a single plan. I was drawn to the attempt to make clear the generic characteristics of the poetic type by means of the contrasts and likenesses of each trinity of creative figures in the three books. The first series, Three Masters was intended to depict, in the life and work of three writers of different nationality - Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoeffsky - the type of the world-portraying novelist; the third series, Adepts in Self-Portraiture, treated of the self-portraitists, the masters of autobiography, in the persons of Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. Between these two books came The Struggle with the Daimon, in which I sought to describe, in Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche - as opposed to Goethe, the genius of self-preservation - the type of the self-destructive poet whose "daimon" at once drags him aloft and thrusts him down into the inner abyss. - Stefan Zweig.