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.



Oliver Matuschek was born in Braunschweig, Germany in 1971. He worked at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum between 2000 and 2004 and helped curate the exhibition The Three Lives of Stefan Zweig at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin in 2008.



He has co-authored several documentaries and published numerous works on literary and historical themes, including "I Know the Magic of Handwriting": a Catalogue and History of the Autograph Collection of Stefan Zweig. Allan Blunden is an acclaimed translator, specialising in German literature. He was awarded the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck prize for his translation of Erhard Eppler's The Return of the State? in 2011.