The Stefan Zweig Collection Literary Manuscripts

This PhD project in the Department of German is funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme, in collaboration with the British Library, for research on the Stefan Zweig Literary Manuscripts Collection at the BL.

Stefan Zweig, one of Austria’s foremost twentieth-century authors, was a passionate collector of literary and musical autograph manuscripts. He settled in England in exile in 1934, moving to Brazil in 1940, where he died in 1942. The London collection, donated to the Library by Zweig’s heirs in 1986, reflects Zweig’s consciously European horizons and contains manuscripts by literary authors including Balzac, Büchner, Dostoevsky, Heine, Hesse, Ibsen, Mallarmé, Rilke and Wilde, and scientists, thinkers and political figures including Darwin, Freud, Hitler, Locke, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Robespierre. It gives spectacular insights into Zweig’s own writing, into his ideas about literary and musical creativity, and into the cultural world of his time.

Pardaad Chamsaz is working both on a PhD, focused on the concept of artistic creativity that Zweig developed through his collection, and, hands-on, to support the Library’s project to digitise the Zweig Collection and promote it to academic and public audiences. He was instrumental in the organisation of a BL Study Day, focused on the collection, in March 2017. He is supervised jointly in Bristol by Steffan Davies and Robert Vilain, and at the Library by the Lead Curator for German, Susan Reed.