Has there ever been a more thoroughly European writer than Stefan Zweig?

As formidable as the elephants that traverse its pages, destroying everything in their path.

And it is in this dissolution, in the humiliating proximity of death, that something extraordinary happens.

While imagination holds no limit, the painting must fit on the canvas and the symphony must unfold on time.

In this initiation novel, Hermann Hesse carves out the duality between the thinker and the artist.