Trip to Russia

"What journey within our immediate world today would be remotely as interesting, enchanting, instructive and exciting as that to Russia? While our Europe, and especially the capitals, are subject to the inexorably contemporary process of mutual assimilation and resemblance, Russia remains utterly unparalleled." Stephen Zweig, 1928. After Stefan Zweig's bourgeois world collapsed with the First World War, he went searching for alternative forms of society, which culminated in a journey through the at that time still young Soviet Union. His perceptions and impressions during the trip remained ambivalent and moved between the generally prevailing glorification of the USSR by parts of the Western European intelligentsia and the harsh reality of life among the population. Stefan Zweig's non-political trip to the USSR is probably one of the most extraordinary travelogues of the 1920s and appears today almost 90 years later as a kaleidoscope into a past that is once again up-to-date.