MontaigneStefan ZweigLabel: Pushkin PressDescription: 'He who thinks freely for himself honours all freedom on earth.'Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found in a damp cellar a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide he would also finally lead Zweig to his death.With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer.
