"Yesterday’s World" is Stefan Zweig’s last book, a confession-will by the famous Austrian writer, written in the midst of World War II in exile. Along with a broad panorama of Europe’s social and cultural life in the first half of the 20th century, the reader will find the author’s reflections on the causes and underpinnings of this colossal human catastrophe—and, despite everything, sincere hope and belief in the final victory of reason, goodness, and humanism.
To “Yesterday’s World,” called a great book by Thomas Mann, took many years before it reached German readers. The path of this book to Russian readers turned out to be much more complicated and, in total, took five decades.