Montaigne

'The others form the human being, I depict him; and here I present an individual who is quite poorly formed and whom I would certainly make largely differently if I had to reshape him. But now that's the way he is.' This phrase from the famous essays of Michel de Montaigne outlines the character of the author and his work. Montaigne wrote his essays not from a position of certainty but from an awareness of his own inadequacy. He thus reveals a level of critical self-reflection that, before his time, was rarely put on paper. Stefan Zweig dedicated a character study to this Michel de Montaigne, the French nobleman and freethinker among the religious dogmatists and political quarrels of the 16th century.

Stefan Zweig (28. November 1881 - 22. Februar 1942) war ein österreichischer Schriftsteller, Dramatiker, Journalist und Biograf. Auf dem Höhepunkt seiner literarischen Karriere, in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren, war er einer der meistübersetzten und beliebtesten Schriftsteller der Welt. Zweig wuchs in Wien, Österreich-Ungarn, auf. Er schrieb historische Studien über berühmte Literaten wie Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens und Fyodor Dostoevsky und über entscheidende historische Ereignisse in Sternstunden der Menschheit. Er verfasste unter anderem Biografien über Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) und Marie Antoinette.